Santa brought me a CMX track cleaning car for Christmas and I finally got around to using it. I should have bought one years ago, just like I should have not waited so long to buy a soldering station.
The mong it removed is amazing. I ran it around the layout twice and then changed the cloth and ran it around again. I show the wife the disgusting bit of dirty cloth on the way to the garbage and she asked if I was going to wash it out. That had not occurred to me, so I poured some Dawn dishwashing liquid on it and it cleaned up like new. Providing no deterioration has occurred to the cloth it will be a long time before I need to buy more cloth.
You’re correct the CMX is a GREAT track cleaning car. I just checked the drawbar on mine and with a dry pad it takes 3.0 ounces to pull it on level track. With the pad wet with ATC-6006 track cleaner it takes 2.8 ounces to pull it. Mine weighs 11.1 ounces empty.
Those increase to 3.3 with ATC-6006 going up my 3½% grade and 3.8 on my 30” radius helix also 3½%.
A single Athearn SD-9 struggles on the long grade and won’t cut the mustard on the helix. I normally use a E7 with 10 ounces of drawbar to clean my layout and CMX does a super job too.
I don’t have a CMX car. If I had a layout I would certainly consider buying one, but before that I would give these antiques a try:
The black car is not in its original format. It came with incredibly coarse grinding stones in each of the three slots. It dates from the brass track era so I’m not surprised that it was designed to be aggressive. I got rid of the stones and replaced them with felt pads made from a sample that a felt manufacturer was kind enough to send me. The resevoir car just needed a new O ring and a new pad made from the same felt.
I have only run the three pad car on my 6’ test track, but you can see that it did pick up some dirt.
They are an interesting and very inexpensive option to the CMX car, assuming that they will work as hoped.
That certainly comes from before the days of the RP-25 wheels - they almost look like Lionel wheels.
Somewhere I might still have the old Revell track cleaning car we used to have. They used the shell of one of the work train cars, and it had what looked like a pair of grinding stones for a Dremel mounted to the weight inside, one over each rail. No wasted material, there was no stone between the rails, just the two blobs over the railhead. Also from the brass track days and far more abrasive then I’d ever touch track with these days.
There was a little lever on the side you could flip that would lift the stones, so you could run it like an ordinary car. I do NOT miss the days of having to take the brite boy to nearly every bit of track nearly every time I wanted to run trains.
I’m hoping that with my nicely finished basement complete with drop ceiling I will continue with the not needing to clean track, other than when paintint it. In the area over the furnace where they can;t install drop ceiling, they are going to seal off the edges, so there won’t just be an opening where all the stuff collected on top can blow out, and the poured concrete floor is fully covered with epoxy floor paint, so there shouldn’t be any cement dust kicked up.
Brent, you may recall that I posted about my experiment with ATF on my rails back in 2012. I was about to dismantle the layout, so I dabbed ATF liberally around several parts and let a BLI Class J and some heavyweight cars trailing it run around the layout for about 20 minutes. It never missed a bit. I was wondering about slipping, but I have since learned that Rail Zip is pretty much re-packaged ATF, and that ATF is good for protecting the surfaces of ‘clean’ rails.
In recent months, a person with some interest in a methodical approach to this perennial problem tried several fluids and learned that non-polar fluids are the best. At the top of that list is kerosene. ATF is down a bit, but still a very good fluid. I am going to get some kerosene and try it. I’ll let you know if you ever have to sell your very nice CMX machine. This will take a few weeks as I have other priorities, but at some point before spring I have to clean all my rails and get some weak electrical spots sorted out, and then run trains.
Henry - that is the car. I may have sold mine on eBay - that may be mine even, being resold. Yet another crazy eBayer - a single car like that ships in the cheap Priority Mail carton which is under $5 anywhere in the US and he wants almost $15 shipping…I pray for people to get educated because anyone with a lick of sense would pass that by.
Dave - there is no furnace room. There used to be, not it’s open to the rest of the basement. Neither the furnace nor the water heater pull air directly from the outside.Previously the furnace room was fully walled off, all the wya to the joists, and the only air inlet was the louvers on the door. There’s no other ventilation in the basement besides what leaks in around the exterior door, garage door, and door upstairs to the house. Has not been a problem since I’ve been here, and nothing disclosed about issues the previous 41 years the house has stood, with older, less efficient equipment. I have a CO alarm.
Hmm, maybe lacquer thinner is the answer because I use denatured alcohol, and the CMX cleaning car results are only so-so.
So, I am back to using a white cloth soaked in denatured alcohol, rubbing it down the rails with my finger, and it does a great job, while my CMX cleaning car sits idly by in the service yard.
For years I used 99% isopropyl alcohol in my CMX. Very good results and no complaints but — if I rubbed a white cloth over the rails a short while later I would pick up a blackish, carbon looking deposit.
I recently read some articles about “non-polar” solvents and on a whim I decided to try using Mineral Spirits in place of the alcohol.
I’ve only begun this transition in the past few months but so far I have found a but of improvement in using the mineral spirits.
I would be a little nervous using lacquer thinner. As Brent has found, a little too much and you begin to soften plastic.
I hate dirty track and I have lots of track through delicate scenery which makes more aggressive cleaning approaches unpractical.
I use a CMX car with an A line roller car followed by a dragger car in my cleaning train. This combo works quite well. I have found that the CMX car can be made to run with less resistance by adjusting the spring on the pad plate to put less downforce on the track.
I have tried most of the solvents out there and currently prefer acetone.
I also use clipper oil which seems to help keep the track running smoothly.
During ops sessions I have several operators that like to run at slow speed. This clip shows what I mean…This loco is running at real speed - no slow motion editing/video tools were used.
Of course using keep alives helps quite a bit as well as track cleaning.
