I am working on an industrial shelf layout design that has several operating tracks that will end at the edge of the benchwork. All are tracks that would have continued on if the layout were larger. One is the continuation of the main line to some industrial spurs. The others are in a yard that will serve as a fiddle yard, but would have been much longer on the prototype before ending in another ladder at the far end.
The question I have is: How would you protect the end of the track to prevent rolling stock from plunging off the layout by accident without putting a bumper there? I was thinking of using a piece of music wire inserted in a hole drilled in the next to last tie, centered to catch a coupler, and painted flat black. Any other Ideas?
I used the ties over the rails with a small pile of ballast to make a small bumper for the end of the spur at the J J Stone gravel pit. (Named for a fellow model rail who worked as a disc jockey using the air name JJ Stone.) If you look close under the conveyor, you can see the END OF THE WORLD. The background is just a stock picture printed on a piece of copy paper for the closeup shot.
On my blimp base layout, I just let the connection from the on-base trackage to the trunkline railroad run off the edge of the layout. But that was always the beginning or the end of a run and it was easy to pay attention at that point in the operation.
Since you have several tracks that come to an end, I like the idea of something solid that they can’t get by - the plexiglass or painted/sceniced masonite. One track on a spur, engineer is paying more attention than a number of tracks in a yard…
Could you put a highway overpass above the tracks to somewhat hide the end of the tracks? A photo of a yard beyond would give the illusion that things continued beyond the bridge.
The only place I have rails going right off the edge is on my staging yard. Since it is hidden, I just glued a block of wood at the end of the rails so nothing can get past. If someone drives in hard it might damage the last car, but it’s got to be better than shoving half a train off the edge of the layout onto the floor below.
I use clear plastic or plexiglass screwed to the masonite fascia and it works fine. Either will flex if bumped into but will prevent the 4 foot fall to the floor. - Nevin
I know that you’re looking for a “low visibility” option, but I think you’d be better off thinking about really reliably stopping errant cars (or engines) from going off that Olympic 10-meter board. One option would be to use the almost-invisible music wire option, but back it up with something removable for “show” purposes, but that would be there 90% of the time when you’re running by yourself.
I’ve got a pair of stub-end sidings in the subway under my layout. They are really just staging/storage, although I did build a subway station around them because, well, because I could. At the end of the line, I put a soft foam bumper pad, not at the coupler level, but higher up where it would meet the non-detailed plastic car end rather than the coupler or the fragile end gates. (These are subway cars, after all.) Since I can’t easily see these tracks, I’ve got some indicator lights installed, but my basic method is to run the trains in there at low speed until they stop at the soft bumpers.
If you don’t want to put a wall at the end of the tracks, you might consider a belt-and-suspenders approach. Use the music wire or other “pretty good” on-layout stop, but back it up with a shelf or net beyond the edge to catch anything that gets by your first line of defense.
I’ve used music wire and it works ok at slow speeds. If you use the music wire, make it easy to pull back out, so you don’t have to uncouple the car from it to get going again.
Thanks everyone, for the suggestions. I had discounted the plexiglass option just for esthetics. I hadn’t thought about a mirrored bridge idea as there was no bridge across the prototype’s yard. There was a street that crossed the yard where it narrowed to a few tracks, but I wasn’t thinking of modeling the street either due to some space limitations for industrial sidings at that end of the layout. I hadn’t thought about the music wire pin getting fouled in the coupler and requiring an uncoupling pick at that point. Since all of these pseudo dead end tracks are used as sidings on the model, I shouldn’t be butting cars against the very end of the tracks anyway. How about a pair of short wires that would pass under the car and stop the axles?
Our club modular layotu uses plexi all around the entire layout. Unlike some display setups, we don’t put a rope barrier out and create a ‘moat’ around the layout - we allow people to come right up to it. Hence the plexi, to keep little kids’ hands off the layout. The whole thing’s not so high that adults can’t look right over it, or shoot photos without the plexi in the way, and it works out quite well. I don’t think a small piece to prevent trains from heading to the floor is going to look bad, especially if you keep it clean and not let it get all scratched up.
1} you shouldn’t be using tracks that run off the board anyway, as you said.
2} A piece of piano wire, whether a single upright or a bent piece to catch an axle may not stop the whole rest of the train if you aren’t aware of how close you are to the ege and your loco is still plugging away at pushing those cars. The cars behind the end car could ram it and other cars off the tracks around a piece of wire and onto the floor.
3} Plexiglass is see through,and doesn’t impeed a view of the layout. As far as I am concerned, it is my choice for all the way around the layout in case something derails and takes a bunch of cars into the plexi “sidewalls”, avoiding any free falls off the layout by locos or cars. It seems to me a mirror would be more obstructive.
another idea is to drive a few nails in, use florists wire {very thin guage} to wrap around the nails as a “fence” to keep cars from falling off. You could paint it all black so that it would be less noticed.
If you have wood you can nail into, a finishing nail that matches up with the coupler will do the trick. As long as the cars don’t buckle or break nothing comes off the track even at full power.
It kind of depends on the purpose of the rails. If they’re something like a mainline connection, you could invent a prototypical reason for having derails there. The only problem is that even oversized derails tend to work like the real things, and a good shove will still send things up and over, and, presumably careening to the floor (this is a bad thing!). But in this case, I think a pieces of plexiglass or raised fascia would do the trick without detracting from your layout.
If it is the end of a spur line, then a Hayes wheelstop, bumper, ties across the track, or any of the above suggestions would be fine.
