Dirty Rail Causing Stalls

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
1

Oh no, not another thread on dirty rail causing stalls!

I have a large basement layout. The basement is unfinished, heated, cooled, and humidity controlled. My layout is a double mainline, and every single piece of track, flextrack and turnouts, has a pair of feeder wires. Same for the yards and sidings.

I have absolutely no stalls on the double mainline and yards (coach and freight). But, I do encounter stalls, especially at slow speeds, on sidings. So, yesterday, I took a closer look at my sidings of which there are several inside my large passenger station where sidings run up against my large freight houses.

Upon closer look, nothing was obvious, no streaks of black gunk, nothing. The loco wheels were clean, no signs of black gunk there either. But, I did notice a slight “glaze” on the rails. Oxidation?

I could have run my CMX car or a piece of cloth soaked in denatured alcohol, but I conveniently grabbed my Bright Boy eraser and went over the sidings which quickly produced bright, shiny rails.

That did it. My best guess is that the lesser used sidings gives oxidation a better chance to work than on the mainlines.

Your thoughts?

Rich

2

Do you like bacon or fried chicken or fish? Is the basement entrance close to the kitchen?

As a test, see if solvent alone fixes problems like this if they recur. Oxidation would not come off nickel silver with alcohol or detergent solution; only physical abrasion of some kind does that. Grease or oil, on the other hand…

You might have set up for quicker recurrence by using the Bright Boy, for reasons perennially rehashed from time to time. If there is any grease in the air it may preferentially settle in the ‘microscratches’ and the little “asperities” at the tops of the scratches that actually contact the tread (and incidentally suffer the start of micro-arcing) eventually may stop making ‘enough’ contact…

3

Interesting observations, Overmod. When I walk down the basement stairs, I have to make a 180 degree turn to reach the layout, so it is not directly at the bottom of the stairs or anywhere near them. That said, the portion of the layout with most of the sidings sits directly below the kitchen. We do prepare zucchini in a deep fryer. So, you think that is the problem?

As far as a Bright Boy is concerned, in spite of some evidence to the contrary, I have always been skeptical of the notion that the Bright Boy is so abrasive that it takes away the smoothness of the rails and creates grooves, inviting even more dirt.

Rich

4

That it produces scratches has been incontrovertibly demonstrated; they are in fact visible through some loupes, and are dramatically visible in my Keeler, let alone upon inspection in a metallurgical microscope. This is not surprising, because as I recall the things are the equivalent of 400 grit sandpaper, and you can probably easily visualize the surface finish you’d get if you took a piece of 360 to 400 grit and rubbed it on a sheet of brass, or your refrigerator door.

I may be able to get to the microscope later this year, since no one has taken me up on the challenge to document the actual effect of various gleaming processes on actual railhead quality and shape. I do know that the effect of lapping plus burnishing is needed to get actual ‘smooth’ rail that is free of longitudinal scratch grooving or microarc pits. Once you have it that smooth, normal solvent or detergent action should suffice to keep it that way… but it would be nice to have documented proof over time.

5

I don’t doubt that a Bright Boy causes scratches on the railheads. I am skeptical of the claim this has a detrimental effect.

6

Hi Rich

I’ve brought it up a few times over the years but is always quickly rejected by skepticism here.

Perhaps consider this if you don’t want to clean your yard tracks for another five years or so. It also takes care of micro scratches.

The downfall is it’s not recommended if you run traction tires on your locomotives. If that’s the case one could skip using it on main lines that stay rather clean from high-use anyway. I wouldn’t think the minimal amount of rolling stock transfer would be an issue if done correctly.

I’ve seen firsthand how well this product works. The video is 20 minutes long and 13 before he gets to it but also has a lot of other good information as well.

https://youtu.be/lBYxjcTWCB0

TF

7

In my years, I have been unable to distinguish the difference between oxidation and dirt.

The observation that the unused sidings need cleaning more than the frequently used rails suggests that friction…or any lingering oils from locos…prevents oxidation from occuring on frequently used rails.

Interesting question. I have no answer.

I use only 90% alcohol to clean the rails.

I have also done the few drops of auto trans fluid on the rails in several locations, spread by the moving trains, and the rails do seem to stay cleaner (the coating prevents oxidation for a while?), but there may be other variables at work here.

8

Through the years I have used a Bright Boy many many times. Lately I have been using a large block pen erasure. It’s a finer abrasive than the BB and a heck of a lot less expensive. I also have a few track cleaning cars with the sliding pad.

Dust and dirt is easy to deal with. The airborne contaminates and oils leaching from plastic wheels is more challenging. Eliminate plastic wheels, no smoking, and fried foods will help but we don’t live in a sterile biolab. My modules are in an unheated basement that is unfinished. Cleaning before playing is the norm.

Pete.

9

I have flextrack on my current layout that I’ve had for 20+ years, used on multiple layouts, and cleaned with a bright boy countless times. I currently have to clean my rails after ballasting and the occasional spot cleaning. I have had to clean the whole of my layout a grand total of once since it’s been up, and I hadn’t been running trains for months leading into that instance, and for the most part it was okay. My current layout has been up for 6 or 7 years in an unfinished, unconditioned basement with no ceiling, bare concrete floor, etc. I’ve had layouts up in far better and far worse locations with some needing frequent track cleaning, others not so much. Either way my heavily used, heavily cleaned with a bright boy flex track that is on my layout performs just as well as the new flextrack I needed when I built it.

10

Different brands of track seem to oxidize at different rates. My ME track oxidizes fairly quickly compared to the other three brands I use and whether trains run or not.

Track stays cleaner if trains are run regularly, all our rolling stock runs on metal wheels.

We use track cleaning fluid on an Atlas car or rag or paper towel or we use a track eraser from Atlas or Peco. Then we run trains.

I have also used a modellers file to file down frogs that sit high on ME and Atlas turnouts. That’s going to leave gouges compared to sandpaper or a track eraser.

I see no difference in oxidation to rail that is filed, sanded, erasered or fluid cleaned. But our layout is only two years old so maybe problems will show up down the road.

11

Try looking at the wheels under magnification, lots of inperfections. But dose this mater, there is a very small area of contact when wheel meets the rail anyway.

12

If your track is nickel-silver, oxidation isn’t the problem. NS oxidizes, but the oxide is electrically conductive. So the problem must be some contaminate getting onto the railhead.

13

That’s a great, straightforward answer!

Edit: However, do you think the rails we have on our layouts are pure NS alloy, or do they still have a decent amount of brass mixed in?

14

Also look at brand new rail and compare. The most mag I have is about 12x but at that mag. their is no difference. What we need is someone to do an accual voitmeter test starting with a peice of track, new but oxidised and progress thru the different methods from alcohol on down to bright boy, might even include very fine sandpaper, I know a lot of track cleaners seem to be 240 grit.

15

Nickel-silver does not oxidize.

Alloys don’t oxidize; the component metals in the alloy do.

The oxides of each of the three component metals are not conductive.

Nickel-silver “oxide” is not conductive.

When steel (an alloy of iron and carbon) rusts, it does not make “steel oxide”. It makes iron oxide. The carbon “does its own thing”, meaning if it oxidizes, it will produce carbon dioxide.

I have done testing using Bright Boy abrasive on rail. It does scratch it, and I’ve got pictures:

I have yet to find any comparison testing between “scratched rail” and “smooth rail” as far as the tendency of each to collect dirt.

BUT.

As long as I can keep my rails clean without scratching them, I see no reason to use a Bright Boy.

Yes, it MAY do no harm. But until I see a need, I won’t be using one. It’s a pain to “un-scratch” installed track.

Ed

16

We keep looking for the ‘Ahaaaa!!’ aspect of this persistent, pervasive, and universally reviled aspect of our hobby. I am beginning to take Ye Olde Eclectic approach to it. It’ isn’t likely to be just one thing. It is likely to be a combination of three things:

a. undulating track where wheel contact is lost, especially on long frames;

b. house dust, maybe some aerosolized grease or other matter, but mostly dust; and

c. dirty pickup tires and/or wipers;

I was surprised to discover, myself, that the oxidation of N/S rail, such as it is, is semi-conductive. This could be a problem of choking the requirement of a decoder metering at a certain rate and not being able to keep up with the demands of the throttle inputs because it can’t get the power it needs. Maybe an engineer could shed light on that. But, if the oxide is semi-conductive, it should still transmit some voltage.

If the oxide is indeed a problem, then the only way any of us can rid ourselves of the plague is to debride it…scrub it away. That can’t be done with wipes and any fluid I know except maybe nitric acid, and good luck with that if you choose that route.

So, as I thought we had pretty much established years ago, we need successive scrubbing with finer grits until we come to a polishing stage, which a steel washer will do for us. Either ways, it’s scrubbing…elbow grease.

Thereafter, I would use the top three fluids listed in that ezine article next door four years ago: kerosene, WD-40 Contact Cleaner, or CRC Contact Cleaner Protectant, and the only after all the hard work had been done. A coating of these three should buy one several years of trouble-free railing, unless the house is dusty.

17

Nickel silver can be considered to be a brass alloy to which nickel has been added.

The “dirty rail” problem results from accumulations of fairly sticky crud on railheads which actually lift the conducting point of the wheels off the rail onto the crud. For current multiple pickup locomotives dirty rails have to be pretty bad to cause problems.

Plain oxidation of nickel silver isn’t the problem. You can hardly even see that, hence the name of the alloy.

G gauge locomotives often use a sliding shoe to pick up power. These seem to also plane off crud from the brass rails commonly used for that gauge. At any rate when cleaning up my G gauge trains clean both the rails and the shoes.

It is as important to clean the pick up wheels on your HO locomotives as it is to clean the rail itself.

18

The components of nickel-silver are nickel, copper, and zinc.

Please compare the conductivity of the oxides of the three above metals with that of the conductivity of the alloy metal. Whether or not the oxides are semi-conductors or not, what is important is the conductivity compared to the alloy. If the conductivity is 1%, then we might expect a rather nasty drop in available voltage. I suspect the conductivity is FAR below 1%.

The extent of oxidation and its impact on model train operation is not settled.

Consider that I have track that was installed 10 years ago, that has never seen an abrasive. It has only been wiped down with paper towels, with or without alcohol. It has been kept in unconditioned space.

And yet.

Trains run just fine on it.

No Bright Boy.

No special oils, like Wahl’s Clipper Oil or transmission fluid.

Just clean dry unabraded rail.

Truly a wonder, is it not?

Ed

19

My thought is that you have a dust problem. Dust would not show as “black gunk”. It would show as “…a slight “glaze” on the rails.”

In my opinion.

Of course, a Bright Boy can remove that, too. Though you probably should wipe the rails down to pick up any grit left behind.

Ed

20

Hi Ed

They’re having their annual 5 year interest-free financing program on Platinum Rail at Goodman Rail Supply again. Thought I’d just bring it up in case you missed that sale 3 years ago[(-D]

[;)]

TF