I have a “what I did” about laying code 55 rail in HO gauge at:
http://www.pacificcoastairlinerr.com/1905/code_55/
Thank you if you visit
Harold
Well done, Harold. Thanks for sharing. That is very helpful to me at the moment as I am contemplating redoing some commercial track to handlaid. Keep up the good work.
Fantastic as usual. Peter Smith, Memphis
Please, Harold, stick with calling it On30 and stop with the “On2 1/2” stuff.
ive handlaid a few HO turnouts in Code 55 without any use of PCBs with no problem at all… i just use the Micro Engineering Micro Spikes. I’ve also done a lot of code 55 track at the NEB&W with just regular wooden ties and spikes. stuff looks great
Having built turnouts on the layout and on the bench, building them at the workbench sure beats on the layout. That turnout two foot from the layout edge is never very good. Oh, my aching back feeling is also missing. PCB turnouts work so much better than ones laid in place on the layout.
Harold
It has been a while - but I had laid code 55 using Pliobond. It is an adhesive that I applied to the bottom of the rail and let it dry. It is laid by possitioning it on the ties and heating it with a soldering iron and cooling it with a heat sink. We also previously used it on code 100. Most of the code 100 that we installed 25(?) years ago is still in place. One thing that we learned early was to pre-curve the rails before installation. Before that some of the rail would spring back and cause out of gauge track.
We still have some of our club members that run deep flanged equipment and they run just fine on the Pliobonded code 55 rail.
Ray
Harold, are your transition curves based on the clothoid or Viennese formulas? It would seem to me that given the era of your railroad the basic cubic parabola would be preferred, but the more modern Viennese transitions produce easier tranlation from the tangent to spirals with a lower uncompenstated lateral jolt. So did you apply “modelers license” to the track geometry, or did you go for era specific authenticity?
Oh I build mine at the bench too. As of yet, I’ve only built them on Central valley’s plastic tie-strips, but that was a huge hassle because the tie-strips are made to be self-guaging for Code 83 and Code 70, but Code 55 has a narrower base, so it doesn’t completely fill up the slots that you put the rail in, the way code 83 and 70 does. You need to use track guages, and when working with cast frogs, its just annoying to make sure everything is correct. DEFINITELY going to just lay them on wooden ties next time.
Would that mean Sn3 is actually Sn36, On3 is On36, and On2 is On24?