Good evening gents.
Justin - what an excellent picture, thanx for sharing it!
Terry - sorry to hear about your difficult day. Funerals are always tough.
keN in M. You're going to have to do a lot of shimming or sanding a piece of cork into a long wedge to support that track to stop it sinking.
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Ken in MD - Are you able to add shims of some type to fill the space before ballasting?
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Ken in MD - As suggested, shims will probably solve the problem. At least you aren't uncoupling now. Good detective work to find the problem, Make me feel lucky that I model the transition era, with the exception of 4 50' box cars, everything else is 40 footers...
...KenMD: I feel you're pain, every time I try to fix something it opens up another can of worms. Would it be helpful to shim first, then drop your ballast, and then run over it and let it settle, before gluing it? Not model railroad conventional, but similar to railroad engineering practice. ...
...Ken- I was going to recommend shimming the rails but several people have beat me to it.
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Shims? Ahh yes, I'd already put in LOTS of 'em along the entire length - no more than a half inch of space between any two sets of them! But right now, shims are the
least of my worries.
I think Murphy got bored hanging around Terry's house and decided to take up residence in my trainroom.
~2 feet south of the newly-shimmed track, I noticed that my locos kept snagging when they were moving northbound. There was nothing immediately visible when I examined that spot, where a section of flex track connected to the diverging rail of a turnout. The joint looked like it was slightly kinked, so I tore up the section of flex track.
But when I got a brand-new, perfectly straight piece of flex track and connected it to the turnout, and tried rolling the loco over it, the 'snag' was still there. I tried filing down the frog where I
thought it was catching - I couldn't see exactly what was happening because it was on the side of the loco facing away from me - but that didn't help. So, I reluctantly ripped out the turnout as well:
Better to concede defeat now and replace it with a Peco, than drive myself nuts trying to fix a worn-out 20-year-old Atlas turnout. (I don't want
Sherrell to have to send the whitecoats chasing after me..!) This wasn't exactly what I had envisioned myself doing this weekend. Oh well, s**t happens...
