The few times I have hand laid track, I have used homasote. I have bunch of cork roadbed that I found before the move. It is possible to glue ties down to cork roadbed and hand spike track and get it to stay down- will it hold spikes? Any other roadbed materials suitable for handlaying track besides homasote? - Nevin
If you can hand lay track on homasote, you can hand lay it on cork. Our club generally didn’t want track to bay hand laid on homasote because it didn’t hold spikes well. We almost always put a layer of Upson board over the subroadbed because it holds spikes better. Generally though the cork only needs to hold the ties and the ties should hold the spike.
Howdy, Nevin.
Where in Nevada? I’m about seven miles west of Nellis AFB.
I’ve hand-laid specialwork on soft foam, which is even worse than cork for holding spikes. Two tricks, both of which work (or seem to.)
- Lay out a cardstock template, paint it your preferred ballast color and ‘caulk’ it to the cork with latex caulk. Then ‘caulk’ your ties to the cardstock and proceed.
- Simply ‘caulk’ your ties to the cork. The caulk seems to ‘grab’ the spikes and hang on - they aren’t that easy to pull once in place.
Since my garage isn’t climate controlled (code requires vents to the outside!) I don’t trust cork to last forever. High heat plus low humidity pretty much bakes the life out of it.
Happy tracklaying
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
Is there any roadbed material suitable for handlaying track besides homasote?; as the next respondent says, there is Upson® board. I have never used it; I have, however, heard from those who have and it is reported that, if it does hold nail better then Homasote® one pays a penalty in an increase in noise.
My experience with handlaying track - except for switches - is extremely limited and in HO Scale is confined to a club I was in in Germany back in the early '70s. They/we were handlaying track and had just got things running when I rotated stateside in '73. They had found a source of plywood on the local market and had cut their subroadbed from this - the thickness was 15 millimeters which works out to about 19/32nds of an inch. Homasote® was unavailable so they/we had purchased full sheets of cork which they/we put down atop the subroadbed. They/we used Tru-Scale® roadbed with individual ties glued to this; track was affixed using a Kadee® spiker®.
Shortly before I left they/we discovered a German material akin to Homasote® and layed down a test section using a subroadbed/Homasote®/Tru-Scale® roadbed configuration. This may have been just a little bit quieter; those in the know said it was but, to be honest, I could never really tell. After I left the Army routed the club out of their quarters and forced it to move into a space that was nearly two times as large as that which they had when I was a member. That was, I am sure, hard to take. I understand that the club went
Chuck:
Seven miles west of Nellis- I know exactly where that is. I was born and raised in Nevada. That is how I developed my love of Nevada RRs. After med school I lived in San Diego for 10 years and then for the past 15 years I lived in Morgantown WV as a Mountaineer. I modeled the B&O and WM while living there. I am now returning to Nevada, only this time it is Reno. I am definitely going to model a Nevada short line, it just is a real problem deciding which one! - Nevin
Nevin
The issues for cork are as Chuck described.
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It eventually dries out and crumbles, sooner in a hot and dry climate. I have personally experienced this with some handlaid turnouts laid on cork after 10 years in Northern Virginia - not exactly a dry climate. I have seen a box of cork roadbed become crumbly after 10 years storage in Maryland and North Carolina - other places not known for low humidity.
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It has a lot of “give” under load. It can’t be depended upon to hold ties glued to it in rigid alignment over time, even if it doesn’t crumble. Because flex track ties and commercial turnouts have some linkage this problem rarely occurs in those situations. But in my personal experience, hand-laid turnouts spiked into cork did not hold their gauge and alignment well enough over a period of as little as 6 months.
Scale thickness softwood ties in HO are generally too thin to hold spikes well by themselves (hardwood ties have to have spike holes pre-drilled). So a spike-holding roadbed is needed. This is especially true if you use low profile ties or sand your tie tops after laying. The latter is a highly recommended practice to ensure level track without vertical irregularities, particularly with code 70 and smaller rail sizes. I’m sure there is a point at which tie thickness is great enough for the ties to hold spikes on their own, but HO isn’t it.
Recommended roadbeds for handlaid track include Homasote, similar dense sound-reduction materials and compressed paper products, soft knot-free pine or similar, soft surfaced plywoods and veneers such as doorskin and luan, and VinylBed. Basically any material that spikes can be pushed into with reasonable force that will hold spikes and nails after insertion will work. As long as the chosen material exhibits these qualities over the long term, it should be OK. A material that requires pre-drilling because it is too hard to drive
Fred W, your #2 paragraph above might explain something to me which I have not thought of. As stated in my previous response (as well as in the post on gaugeing we had a brouhaha in about six months ago), my (N Scale) Code 55 switches are glued and not nailed to their cork footprint; they actually give me very little problems as far as keeping aligned. It seems to me that by glueing them down I am, in essence, giving them the characteristic of one of commercial manufacture. I may, as stated, check out these Proto 87 Stores® spikes but it may be just for cosmetic reasons.
Because I have had to move frequently over the course of the past few years my layouts have, unfortunately, not been of long duration but I have not, when I have demolished them when I have had to move, observed this deterioration of the cork which you cite. I always try to salvage my switches even though my number five and a half or my number thirteen frogs may not be usable on my next layout. I have accumulated quite a few (unusable) switches - at least the frogs - salvaged off of past layouts. Only recently have I begun using water soluble glue to fix my ballast in place and therefore enable me so soak them loose if they have to be changed. This method allowed me to salvage quite a bit of trackage - and every last one of my switches, by the way - from the layout which I just recently had to junk. Wish I had thought to examine the cork most of which was layed down in aught one.
I have built 2 different layouts (S scale and HO scale) using cork roadbed with handlaid ties and rail. I’ve not had any problems using this method. I glue the ties to the cork with Elmers Carpenters Glue (the yellow stuff) and spike it down with M-E small spikes. I’ve used this procedure with codes 70, 83 and 100 rail. The spikes hold well and after gluing the ballast down are difficult to remove.
Hope this helps.
Roger
[quote user=“fwright”]
Nevin
The issues for cork are as Chuck described.
-
It eventually dries out and crumbles, sooner in a hot and dry climate. I have personally experienced this with some handlaid turnouts laid on cork after 10 years in Northern Virginia - not exactly a dry climate. I have seen a box of cork roadbed become crumbly after 10 years storage in Maryland and North Carolina - other places not known for low humidity.
-
It has a lot of “give” under load. It can’t be depended upon to hold ties glued to it in rigid alignment over time, even if it doesn’t crumble. Because flex track ties and commercial turnouts have some linkage this problem rarely occurs in those situations. But in my personal experience, hand-laid turnouts spiked into cork did not hold their gauge and alignment well enough over a period of as little as 6 months.
Scale thickness softwood ties in HO are generally too thin to hold spikes well by themselves (hardwood ties have to have spike holes pre-drilled). So a spike-holding roadbed is needed. This is especially true if you use low profile ties or sand your tie tops after laying. The latter is a highly recommended practice to ensure level track without vertical irregularities, particularly with code 70 and smaller rail sizes. I’m sure there is a point at which tie thickness is great enough for the ties to hold spikes on their own, but HO isn’t it.
Recommended roadbeds for handlaid track include Homasote, similar dense sound-reduction materials and compressed paper products, soft knot-free pine or similar, soft surfaced plywoods and veneers such as doorskin and luan, and VinylBed. Basically any material that spikes can be pushed into with reasonable force that will hold spikes and nails after insertion will work. As long as the chosen material exhibits these qualities over the long term, it should be OK. A material that requires pre-drilling because i
I can believe that gluing ballast to cork could seal it enough to delay deterioration for quite a while. Especially if the bottom side is also sealed by gluing to subroadbed. My disgust with cork came early enough in my handlaid track career that I switched to Homasote or equivalent, and never tried cork for handlaid track again. When I later used cork on a 3 rail O layout, all the reasons I disliked cork were brought back to my memory.
As I said, I tried a couple of types of soft wood for roadbed on displays, and always ended up curling a bunch of spikes in the hard spots in the grain.
So I’ll stick with Homasote (preferably the real stuff) for the foreseeable future. FWIW, once I started using Homasote, I also started ballasting before spiking rail on my handlaid track.
yours in trackwork
Fred W
The one and only time that I handlaid any track I used ready-made milled roadbed made out of soft pine that I ordered out of the Walthers catalogue. This was 25 years ago so I don’t even know if it is still available, but it was easy to work with and held the spikes well. Cork sounds “iffy” to me and I am not a fan of Homasote for anything except filling expansion cracks in cement which is its primary purpose.
John Timm
I’ve been handlaying track (HO) onto cork underlay for over 20yrs and have found it to be an excellent medium for assembling trackwork. I use PVA Wood Glue, which bonds wood, hardboard, particle board etc to each other. The great thing about this glue is that it dries clear (It starts off white), is non hazardous, so it doesn’t matter if it gets on your fingers (and then into your mouth!!!) and non staining (when you wipe your hands on your clothes!). Plus if in years to come you want to dis-assemble your layout, Hot Water will do the trick of allowing you to remove your wooden or printed circuit sleepers from the cork. And as long as you are spiking your track, you can even slightly move the alignment, once the glue is set, to fit the appropriate space.