I am no longer able to get down on the floor for my setup. I have taken it down and cannot get several sections of Lionel fastrack apart. I have tried WD40 with no luck. What can I do to get these things apart without ruining them?
I use a small flat blade screwdriver and insert it between sections near the plastic connectors. Sometimes it pops apart, sometimes it needs a gentle twist. I do it from the bottom if possible.
Good luck
Paul
I tried that.before writing here. Nothing seems to work.
With the track upside down try to wedge a tiny screwdriver into the open end of the plastic E shaped clip that accepts the i shaped plug from the neighboring track, see if you can spread the clip open and free up the section.
Worse-comes-to-worse try bending up the tabs on the underside of the sections , this will release the hold the rails have to the plastic, and see if the additional freedom around the pins lets you wiggle things more loose.
Getting FasTrack sections to come apart has not really been a problem. Just the opposite. By any chance could anyone applied one of the home-brew fixes to keep the sections together? These include slightly bending he center pin or adding a clip to hold sections together.
I don’t know whether this problem is widespread or not for FasTrack (nor do I know when it may have happened if it was limited to just a small batch), but there is a CHANCE that the integrated track pins may have the dreaded zinc pest problem that unfortunately still happens from time to time. (though to be completely honest, if I’m going to experience zinc pest I’d rather it be on some pieces of FT vs on a steam engine shell or side frames for a scale GG1.)
I had a circle of O48 FasTrack that I used for a loop around the Christmas Tree at my parent’s house. It was seemingly fine for quite a few years (I disassembled it for storage each year). I don’t know for sure the vintage of when I bought this particular track, but I’m thinking it was probably in the early to mid 2010’s time frame.
At some point the pest symptoms came about, and the pins expanded, some cracking/crumbling. I think I actually found the problem when re-assembling one year, and then realized what was happening with troubleshooting and further examination. I seem to recall I may have first noted problems with voltage drop around the small loop, then found the pest with further examination and it was possibly my further assembly and disassembly that triggered the actual disintegration event for the pins.
Wow! That really surprises me they’d use zinc for connector pins or as a track component to begin with. Zinc was tried as a toy train track material during WW2 when all steel production was going to the war effort. The zinc tracks didn’t work out. While zinc would conduct electricity fairly well it eroded quickly from sparking and most likely the AC voltage going through it exacerbated the problem.
I DID have some connector pins break on some Fastrack pieces of my own and zincpest could be as good an explanation as any. Oddly enough I’ve cut through some of those track pins when I was using Fastrack on display shelves and it took some effort to do so. I didn’t think it was anything other than steel.
While the basic design of FT was certainly very innovative, it’s features must have driven needing to implement some of these “odd” cast approaches that are quite different than the traditional pins we have/had for O and O27.
Obviously the inner rails having “half” pins so that they could always mate with another piece of track from either end necessitated something that was not perfectly round. I’m no mechanical engineer, but I’m not sure what they could have done instead of casting these out of something.
The outer rail pieces maybe could have been round since it just mates to the rail, but since they also wanted to make the pins integral with the trackbed, the odd shapes required to do that probably also forced a cast solution.
FastTrack of a certain age/batch/who knows, seems to have issues in general with tarnish, zinc pest, and the such. As I have had issues with a bunch of track I bought at the same time, but not other pieces of track bought later on.