Difficulty With temperature varation

Model Railroader Layouts and layout building
1

Anyone have challanges with extreme temperature variations in their train room.? MY wife has cancer, and the train table is where a hospital bed, and oxygen tanks need to go. I will be moving all my stuff out to the second floor of the garage, The Temp.inside the garage will follow outside ambient by about an hour. I have a wood stove I can hook up, and can raise the temp into the upper 70s-low 90s., from whatever the outside tempurature is. Does the thermal shock set up problems My only experience is with marine electronics on commercial fishing boats, and police cars. I fulley intend to finish this project. if nothing else just for the principal of the thing.

As it stands it looks like Miz Robin’s first grade class school project–that is two weeks behind schedule. About the time I think I have it—Lion will post shots of his subway and it’s==damn why did’nt I think of that–up comes the track and the re-figure starts.

I will attempt some serious work out there while I am taking care of her. She has viral squicell cancer in her lymphnodes, and toncils, and is going to recieve six weeks of radiation, five days a week. There is talk of puting a feeding tube in, as her neck and throat will be too raw to swallow.

So where my layout is, won’t be. Dont know wheather to pack it away, or try to build/run in a cold garage… building somthing helps keep sanity. The last time this happened I had just hauled a 50 foot trawler up on the ways to work on, found out my then wife has cancer and ended up taking care of her, and working on the boat, getting it ready for winter shrimp fishing. The boat helped me keep my sanity.

Anyway, looking for pointers on cold weather operation. Familiar with LPS-25, CRC-5-52, 5-56, Breakfree, LPS-15, WD-40, 7T-35, carbon tet, and the rest.

The area is 28X36, any information would be appreciated.

Thanks

Herrinchoker

2

If your benchwork is made from wood, paint both sides of the wood to seal the pores of the wood. When track starts buckling, most people attribute it to the track, when it’s actually the wood expanding and contracting due to humidity changes.

3

Thanks for that.

4

I have just dug out a wooden G scale stock car I built many years ago. It had been stored in our attic for years, where temperatures range from -4°F in Winter to 122°F in Summer. The car survived without any damage.

I think that painted lumber can cope quite well with temperature changes, providing it is well seasoned. A bigger enemy to deal with is humidity. If your new layout location stays fairly dry, you won´t encounter much problems with the temperature variation.

5

And, my prayers go out to you and your wife!

6

It is too bad that you and your wife (she mostly) have to endure this arduous battle. I hope you both come out the other end smiling like schoolkid lovers. [:D]

As Marlon says, it is rare that your tracks will be affected by temperatures unless you have absolutely no sliding joiners and all your track ends abut against each other rather tightly. In that case, the rails will expand over temps of around 20 deg change and higher, and they could very well buckle here and there. So, leave a few sliding joiners and do leave about 1/8" of gaps in total over every six feet or so of tracks. Split between two or more gaps is ideal.

So, the bad news usually comes from significant changes in the ambient humidity, and it will be a bear to control in a garage…sorry. Ideally, you should build your benchwork with milled lumber that is either sealed with varathane or something largely impermeable to moisture, or just wait until your season comes with the ‘average’ humidity and build the benchwork during that period. Doing that, the extremes on either side of the average are not likely to be that far away from your centred building point. To be clear, if you built it during the dryness of mid-winter, in a garage heated often with a decent wood stove, your benchwork will find itself facing an increase in 50-70% humidity come July and August, and you’d have some serious problems with rails coming apart at some places and buckling at others. Or, if you build it with damp wood in mid-August and then go to run trains in January, all the tight joints would have closed up as the wood dries and shrinks, and you’d definitely find buckled tracks here and there.

-Crandell

7

First, my sympathy to you and your wife. I hope the aggressive chemo will help.

Faced with a 100 degree(F) seasonal temperature range and frequent 50 degree daily fluctuations, plus very low humidity all the time, I went with steel benchwork. Steel studs can be assembled in standard Westcott L-girder format and have absolutely zero tendency to react adversely to temperature or humidity changes, unlike forest products that can assume ‘interesting’ (aka useless) shapes when they dry out.

A few additional advantages:

  • Form natural wire runs. Just tuck the wire inside the stud, then snap short lengths of cap stock over the open side to act as retainers.
  • Assemble with tiny screws that cost about 25% of the price of decent wood screws.
  • Never split if you don’t pre-drill a screw hole.
  • Risers can be made, with screwing flanges bent with a pair of vice grips, from odd cut-offs.

I bought mine at my local big box home improvement centers, for about what decent-quality finished lumber would have cost - and I didn’t have to sort through the whole pile to get a half dozen decent pieces.

Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - in a Mojave Desert garage)

8

My prayers are with you both.

I am wondering if you should think “smaller” at the moment. Is ther a place you could work on a smaller layout? You could go N if you were thinking HO. It would give you something to do, maybe closer to her. Even though it isn’t the layout you are hoping to finish, you’d be busy, improving your skills and not in such a hostile environment. When you were done with it and ready to move on to something bigger, donate it to a children’s cancer center. They’d love to watch it.

Just some thoughts,

Richard