Tried that today with a bit of CRC fluid on a patch of cloth across the tracks. But it never occurred to me to ask directly, how is this simply done? Do you hold one set of wheels lightly spinning on the powered track while the others spin on the cloth? Is that hard on the contact wheels?
I think I will make a little gizmo with wipers to ride up against the contact wheels with a spring action rather than hold them spinning on the track.
Don’t know what you mean by a “cloth”. I’ve always seen what you are describing done with a paper towel. You do need a good quality paper towel, not one of those store brand cheap ones that will fall apart when some liquid hits it. A piece of cloth seems too thick to me.
As far as the process, what you describe is correct. One truck of the diesel is placed on the towel and the engine is run while being held in place with the other truck picking up power. As far as I’m concerned, no damage will occur to the wheels unless you are holding down the drive end with so much force that you are grinding the wheels into the track. If you have the engine up to full speed when you do the cleaning, the process only should take a few seconds anyway.
It’s NS wheels rubbing on NS rail, about the only thing you’re going to do is pollish the surfaces.
Or, you can find yourself a block of foam or make a cradle out of wood, take the cover off the loco and attach leads to your engine. Hold a cloth to the wheels and turn up the power.
Personally, I do the paper towel thing with some alcohol, you would not believe how dirty those wheels get.
I use a paper towel like you see.
For the track I’ve a few track cleaning cars.
Wolfgang
From my hints and Tips Gerome!
Get some reasonable strength paper towel and some white spirit (DO NOT use Turpentine for this!) and wet a small area of the paper towel with the white spirit. The quilted type of towel is ideal!
Lay your paper towel over the track with enough “slack” that you can run your wheels on the paper
towel
3 Using a little pressure, move your vehicle up and down the paper towel by hand and watch the paper towel get dirty. Move your towel over a bit when the track of the treads gets dirty until no more comes off.
Voila one cleaned vehicle in a few seconds!
You would expect that the towel would tear to shreds quickly and eventually it does, but it is very easy to get through a whole yard of vehicles. Every now and then you get a “severe case” but your task is really minimised! By judicious holding of powered locos, you can get wheel treads of these also clean by self powering the loco. Hope this helps increase your operating time and pleasure!
AND AN IMPROVED METHOD FOR CLEANING WHEELS…
I have been cleaning wheel sets with paper towel for quite some years and I have only had hassles when the “crud” got too much. Basically it involves wetting the paper towel with white spirit and
running the wheels over the towel laid over the rails. Locomotives can power themselves with judicious positioning.
A friend of mine modified this task to use cotton cloths such as Chux that I have noticed recently. This has a couple of advantages in that the surface is microscopically rougher so than it cleans the
wheels better, the cloth lasts much longer so there is less mess and the holes as such are capable of providing contact in the case of powered wheels thro
Well, some nickel steel wheels are really brass with nickel steel plating on them. So technically, if left to grind together for a long time, I suppose that one could cause damage. But again, for the amount of time that the cleaning operation takes, this isn’t going to be a problem.
Just an anecdotal contribution to this subject. I found out the towel on track cleaning method by myseld in the early sixties but at that time paper towels of sufficient strenght were not available over here. For my job I was flying several times a year and discovered that the paper towels in the airplane washroom were quite strong so each flight I took a pocket full of these towels to tie me over till the next flight.
Hans
What is “White Spirit”? Is this the same as mineral spirits?
It’s nickelsilver not nickel steel.
Yeah, whatever. The point I was trying to make concerned the plating, not my ability to spell or identify materials properly. Further, the material is an alloy of copper and nickel (and maybe some other combinations) and gets it’s name from the color. In most model railroad applications I doubt that there is any real silver in it. Picky, picky, picky!!!
Gerome:
There are some that don’t approve of using Goo Gone, but I have done this for a long time and it works both for rolling stock and motive power, as well as cleaning track. There are those who will say don’t use Goo Gone, but I can tell you from years of experience it has served me well. You can use other materials as track cleaning fluid. Micro Mark has a complete set up to do this.
This is some of what I use.
I take a section of track cover part of it with a paper towel and soak it with Goo Gone. I then place the motive power, let’s say the front truck on the paper towel and the back set of trucks on the powered track. I hold the paper towel with one hand and the engine with the other, after turning on the power, allowing the wheels to turn riding on the soaked paper towel.
I then turn the engine around and do the other trucks. I can also do this with steam.
Rolling stock is done with my hand rolling the car over the soaked paper towel of Goo Gone, the dirt comes off the truck tires. After cleaning the wheels I clean the track.
Either with a track cleaning car and or eraser, as well as use the track cleaning bar.
I also have a track cleaning car, whereby I can soak weighted rollers, again with Goo Gone, and pull them along the track in a specially made car.
After all of this, I place LaBelle 101 oil around the layo
HI there,
You can use rubbing alcohol which also works very well. White Spirit is different here from either Mineral Turpentine or Methylated Spirit but available in hardware stores here in Australia… so you should be able to get it… it will be in the same area!
Cheers from Down Under
Trevor www.xdford.digitalzones.com FYI
Try using old dryer softener sheets, Bounce.
Or Rain X windshield sheets. They will not tear
like paper towels. I prefer using alcohol.
Heres my set up for cleaning my loco’s and what i use for cleaner
I use coffee filters. Strong and lint free.
Those blue paper towels from Auto Zone or Wally World in the automotive dept. work great…