Kind of long and it rambles a bit but bear with me here…
Well, If not for this forum I may never have staggered on to this… Using a metal poli***o clean rails. Somewhat skeptical I decided to give it a try. I can’t attest to the longevity of it but my initial reaction is very good. What I did was go to the auto parts supply (late last night, open 24 hours) after reading some stuff here and looking for sources online…
They Had Flitz at $8.99 per tube but after reading a couple of the posts on the subject I decided to try one of the less expensive wheel polishes… Chose Blue Magic just for price reasons. 7oz for $4.99… They had Mothers too of course, 4oz at $4.99… I figured if one would work so would the other.
Anyway, on further suggestion by somebody here, I used a piece of Homasote to apply and rub this stuff into the rails. The blue magic has an amonia base so if you decide to try it you may not like that property of it… At first, it does smell quite a bit. With a cloth, wipe some of the blue gook onto the surface of the homasote and begin polishing the rails. WIthin seconds of light scrubbing the surface of the homasote had turned black. A further rub with a clean piece of homasote removed any excess. One complaint about using polish I’ve seen here did not happen with that method. No real residue left behind… Okay, Now I’m convinced it’ll at least remove Something from the rails but How clean are they?? In other words, How well does a loco run on them now?? Well, Let me tell you… Initially I am thouroughly impressed… Here’s why…
I measure relative train speed by counting ties per second that a loco travels. That is if the train passes 10 ties in one second it’s traveling at 10mph… That May not be how you do it but it works for me. I have a proto 1000 F3 (pennsy green) with a digitrax DH121 decoder that is an okay runner but doesn’t come close to my stewarts on low speed performance… That is before the blue magic treatment. The loco hasn’t s
I’m interested to see how long it will last. I use goo-gone about twice a month to keep things running good. I am very curious to see what happens here, please keep us informed.
I have been sold by CMRProducts who, with the patience of Job, has repeatedly attempted to convince the rest of us that he has found it to be foolproof. Especially tempting for me is the need to clean every many months, not twice a month.
I used to have to clean my track every day. Then I got MAAS metal polish and I had to clean about every two days after that. NOTE: my layout is in a garage.
The polish works but it also helps that you have a clean environment for your layout to reside in.
I’ve seen some pretty clean garages… In some instances, cleaner than the homes they are attached to. In my case, Basement, finished walls, insulated, drop ceiling, temperature 70 degrees year around give or take a few on more extreem days. When doing nothing other than running the trains, it’s relatively dust free.
I intend to use the low speed as the benchmark for this pseudo test… Say once per week, see how much throttle is required to keep the (same) loco running and how slow will it creep. Right now, the spike in the ballast is at 3 seconds per tie on this particular section of track. The claim is, if I understood it correctly, is that no more than a quick pass with a vacuum (paraphrasing a bit here) is needed when the rails are Polished rather than Cleaned, just to remove whatever dust has collected.