Homosote takes spikes and track nails well and it does some sound deadening. But cutting it or working it, especially with power tools, makes an awful mess. The little fuzzy, papery cuttings go every where and static cling makes them difficult to sweep up, or get out of your clothes. And I want my roadbed to be 1/4 inch thick (for HO) and I never saw Homosote that thin. You would have to resaw the homosote into 1/4 inch. Then cut your roadbed with a band saw, and then chamfer the edges to 45 degrees with a router. By the time that was finished I hate to think of what my shop would look like. I don’t like cork, it doesn’t hold nails or spikes.
I went for soft pine roadbed. That comes 3/4 inch thick from the lumberyard and I resawed down to 1/4 inch on my bandsaw.
Here is my bandsaw with a home made fence chewing thru a walnut board. This 3/4 inch piece of walnut is getting cut right in half to make 3/8 inch thick pieces for a non-railroad project. Pine cuts much easier and I could cut each pine board into three 1/4 inch pieces. Before starting you want to use a square to make sure the table is at 90 degrees to the blade, and that the fence is at 90 degrees to the table. And you want to use the widest blade your bandsaw will take (mine will only take 1/2 inch) with coarse teeth, or even a skip tooth blade.
Here is the same cut, viewed from the front of the bandsaw. Did you notice how the old time Sears marketing folk got a big label carrying both Sears and Craftsman names and the name of the tool. Nice and big nobody will miss it. Wanna bet one reason Sears is gone is they forgot how to market stuff?
Sheldon, thanks for that explanation. What prompted me to ask Randy that question was my review of the Homasote web site and its suppliers including one in Reading PA.
But, as the replies to this thread added up, I realized that Cascade milled the Homasote product into usable pieces, suitable for model railroading roadbed.
Since Randy has such a liking for Homasote and needs so much for his planned layout, I would encourage him to find someone locally, perhaps a carpenter, who could mill 1/2" sections of Homasote into usable p
Homosote takes spikes and track nails well and it does some sound deadening. But cutting it or working it, especially with power tools, makes an awful mess. The little fuzzy, papery cuttings go every where and static cling makes them difficult to sweep up, or get out of your clothes. And I want my roadbed to be 1/4 inch thick (for HO) and I never saw Homosote that thin. You would have to resaw the homosote into 1/4 inch. Then cut your roadbed with a band saw, and then chamfer the edges to 45 degrees with a router. By the time that was finished I hate to think of what my shop would look like. I don’t like cork, it doesn’t hold nails or spikes.
I went for soft pine roadbed. That comes 3/4 inch thick from the lumberyard and I resawed down to 1/4 inch on my bandsaw.
Here is my bandsaw with a home made fence chewing thru a walnut board. This 3/4 inch piece of walnut is getting cut right in half to make 3/8 inch thick pieces for a non-railroad project. Pine cuts much easier and I could cut each pine board into three 1/4 inch pieces. Before starting you want to use a square to make sure the table is at 90 degrees to the blade, and that the fence is at 90 degrees to the table. And you want to use the widest blade your bandsaw will take (mine will only take 1/2 inch) with coarse teeth, or even a skip tooth blade.
Here is the same cut, viewed from the front of the bandsaw. Did you notice how the old time Sears marketing folk got a big label carrying both Sears and Craftsman names and the name of the tool. Nice and big nobody will miss it. Wanna bet one reason Sears is go
So sad to hear this. Steve Cox opened the business as an alternative to the original Homabed brand, which had become unreliable and of low quality. He eventually bought the brand and the Homabed web site name.
After struggling to get product from the original owner, Steve suplied an excelent product and turned around the orders in a reasonable time. His communication was also first rate.
I’m very sorry to see this site closing. Homabed is a great product.
Count me in as disappointed as well. I had intended on using Cascade products for my layout as I have previously used Homabed and really, really liked it. I have a full sheet of Homasote somewhere in storage, and I guess I can “make my own” but I would prefer not to go that route.
The only reason Homasote took off, except for hand layers was there was a shortage one time with cork. Even Midwest had trouble getting it. Midwest then came out with a product that used less cork, never changed the name. This stuff had black in it “made of foam I beleive”, it was terrible as it could not be sanded (at least not well). I hated this new product and so did others. Midwest later went back to therir old way of doing things. Homasote is the best I have seen if you handlay, otherwize, why bother.
Because it holds spikes much better than cork. I hate gluing flextrack to foam; I will never do that again. And I don’t want to have to nail through cork to the plywood to get track to stay put.
Homabed on homasote was a dream to build a layout on.
Unfortunately, they don’t have a 1/8" thickness, which is actually proper for HO mainline track. (Per CNW and SOO track standards, there should be 12" of ballast under the ties on mainline track)
Steve Cox posted here a few times in answer to questions. ANd I will say, he is handling the shutdown well. I finally decided to take the refund offer since I don;t want to start my layout with the hope that the product will reappear in a few months, and replied as such to the email he sent out. I literanlly got the refund notice from PayPal not 5 minutes after I sent my email.
Sad to see the product go, even more so when the business owner was doing things the way they should be done. A great product at a fair price, with reasonable expectations on delivery up front, and taking care of the business side in a prompt (more than prompt) manner. I certainly wasn’t expecting the refund to be generated any earlier than normal hours today, and wouldn’t have cared if it took a few days.
Yes but there should be elevation of track beyond the ballast, and cork roadbed and homabed are intended to at least mimic that elevation, but there should be even more. There is ballast, below which there is roadbed and below that subroadbed. Then culverts, then ditches. The PRR’s 1917 standards called for a least a one foot base of cinders below the ballast; they also called for 2 feet 1 and 3/8 inches of stone ballast for single track and 2 feet 3 and 1/2 inches of stone ballast for double track. I wonder whose job it was to measure the 3/8" of ballast!
Those same 1917 standards dictated that there be no less than 3 feet, 7 and 3/4 inches from the bottom of a drainage ditch to the top of the ties for single track; 3 feet 9 3/8 inches from the bottom of a drainage ditch to the top of the ties for double track. The 1925 standards for the Chicago & North Western required that the top of a pipe (sewer, water, etc.) under a grade crossing be a minimum of 4 feet 6 inches below the tops of the ties, and 4 feet minimum from the bottom of any drainage ditches. All of this indicates that a “normal” elevation of right of way needs to be considerably greater than that provided by a single layer, or even a double layer, of commercial roadbed material.
Yes, but the subroadbed is wider than the ballast bed (again per SOO and C&NW standards). I was able to match the standards by using O scale Homabed with a 1/2 inch gap between the halves, and the HO homabed on top of that. Matched the standards diagram to within a scale inch or two.
Received my order. Quick turn around and delivery. Easy to buy.
The product itself doesn’t seem to be much different than WS, but I’m not greatly experienced with WS. The thumb test can make a suppression in the roadbed.
I tested a 5 ft section. Placing tracks on it spreads out the pressure, and I notice no movement in the foam, so it seems dense enough. If someone were to run heavy brass steamers and 50 car trains, that might be different than my lone plastic diesel pulling a 10 car train. For my needs, it seems dense enough.
I tried curving it as advertised. I’m using a minimum 36 inch curve, and the foam wants to buckle along the inside while making that sharp of a curve. Seems like I will need to cut some relief slices if I wanted it to lie flat without stress on anything sharper.
Like most track and track laying products, I don’t see a clear advantage of using this over another, or any reason to not use it. I’ll lay down the entire 60 ft in the staging/interchange area and see if I want to buy more for the rest of the layout or go with cork.
I caulk the roadbed to the subroadbed, and caulk the track to the roadbed. Not sure how this product would work with nails.
That’s good, I ordered some and it is waiting for me at home right now. I have on hand some WS, homasote, cork, and now this. SO I cna compare them all.
I gave up nailing track two layouts ago and never looked back. I also found a good video on YouTube of a guy doing some hand laying which finally has visual evidence of what I’ve said all along based on my experience using homasote. It does NOT hold spike, or nails, or anything. It’s just easy to push in to. The holding is the spike going through the wooden tie. Maybe my idea of ‘holding’ is different than other people - I thinkof a fasterner holding in material like a screw or nail into wood - it usually takes tools to remove and somethign will be damaged. I once built an N scale layout with a layer of homasote. I used cork roadbed, and track nails to attach the cork to homasote and track to the cork. The cork had more gripping power on the nails than the homasote, but even then, when I demolished that layout, I simply lifted all the nailed-down track off by hand, the nails just easily pulled off the homasote and usually pulled a section of cork with it. The only thing remotely ‘held’ in the homasote was in the corner where I had my Atlas control boxes screwed in place. ANd those screws might have been long enough to reach the underlying plywood, I don’t remember. Laouts I made after that with just cork on plywood, still nailed - lot more work to drive track nails in to the plywood, and none of it was coming up without careful prying while trying to not break the tie with the nail through it.
That is a vastly different experience than I’ve ever had with Homasote.
Any time I’ve pulled up cork off Homasote, the nail tears right through the cork and I have to fight with a pair of plyers to get the nail out of the Homasote.
Same here. I had just a few nails holding un-ballasted turnouts in place on homasote, it was hard to getthe nails out.
A lot of the guys I knew back in the day did not even spike thru the ties, they spiked next to the tie, directly into the homasote. That’s what I did on the 1973 layout, worked great.
On the old layout I just took down, I had one scratch built curved turnout, same thing, I spiked next to the ties with no issues. I built that tunout with the points and frog from an Atlas #8.
This does seem pretty similar to WS. Just not quite as squishy.
I was able to curve WS without cutting it to 30" and even slightly less when I used it. Curving it by just pulling the two ends towards you buckeles it, but if you actually hold it down along the curve line, it can easily do a 30" or wider curve without needing to be cut.
One thing is the WS roadbed has a cut line sliced in it if you DO have to cut through, this does not.
Homasote holds flextrack fine because all you need is a bit of strength to keep the track aligned. The amount of upwards force on model railroad track is virtually nil.
Yes, its advertised as being denser than WS and it probably is. This would account for it not forming as sharp of curves as WS.
Also, I did not work that long at curving this product into a 36 inch radius curve. I did notice that it wasn’t so dense as to prevent me from stretching the outer side and compacting the inner side when making curves. So with some effort and some adhesion as a work along, I can probably shape it into 36 inch radius without making any relief cuts.
Less squishy than WS is a good thing, and the price is a good thing too.
