I’m working on an N-scale layout. It has #4 turnouts, a 45 degree crossing, and a 90 degree crossing. Whenever an engine crosses one of these, it skips a little and derails. On the crossings, there’s a lot of extra plastic between the rails, can I cut some of that away without wrecking them?
Thanks
-matthew
Absolutely. This is most likely mold residue, commonly referred to as flash. Take a needle file, square or triangular in shape, and clean it up so the flanges of your equipment doesn’t hit it anymore.
If there’s really a lot of crud in there, a hobby knife might serve you better than a file, but you want to be careful you don’t cut too much away.
Clean wheels, clean track and a well serviced loco.
The derailing could be a loco problem or something else.
A couple of questions to help others with your probem.
Brand of track, crossings and switches.
Type and brand of locos.
The knowledgeable folks here will be more able to answer with a little more information.
Good luck,
Richard
The track is all Atlas Code 80.
The whole strip between the rail and the guard rail is what I want to cut out. Is that still OK?
All of the engines are Rapido, at least 30 years old. I don’t know the prototype models but here they are:
The last one has HUGE flanges on the wheels.
These three run the best but I have others I’m trying to recondition.
Matthew
Is it the large flanges of the wheels that are the issue? Older model equipment had what us HO modelers call pizza cutter wheels. The close up picture of the crossing shows a large flange wheel would definitely hit. You may try a piece of hack saw blade or a mini saw that goes into a hobby knife to cut some of the flangeways deeper. Another alternative is to re wheel the loco if you can.
Pete
The Frisco engine has noticeably large flanges. The other two don’t seem unreasonable. How big should they be?
I also use Atlas code 80 and can say for sure it is the wheels on the engines and cars, as I had the same derailing as you are having. You may have a turnout once in a while that needs tweaking, but should not have a cross over problem
I very quickly realized that all of my older engines (bought around the mid to late 1970’s) such as you have were not going to be usable for reliable operation. I just put them away and started to buy engines that are sold when I started my layout in 2007. Then for my older cars that I still wanted to use I replaced the pizza cutter wheels with Atlas metal wheels. All of the newer cars have wheels that have much smaller flanges and are narrower. So now if I have derails and it is not a bad wheels set I know that I have a track problem that needs to be corrected.
Well, after cleaning the track, vacuuming all the misc. debris that has been collecting, and cleaning the wheels (for a second time) the Santa Fe ran pretty smoothly. The layout I’ve been building has been a “learning layout”. I plan to build a much larger one in the future and haven’t decided if I want to stick to N or move to HO. (And here’s hoping I don’t start another N vs. HO debate.) If I decide to stick to N, I will start buying new engines but for right now, I would rather spend the money on other supplies.
Considering that we can’t even see much of what all those tiny 1/87 gizmos have to contend with way down where the wheel meets the rail, it is no wonder there are some problems after a while. They can be associated to wear and sloppier tolerances, to mixes of items not really engineered to work together (such as the more modern crossing or diamond and older larger flanges), and even lint and hair can impact the models after a year or two of accumulating them and wrapping them around journals, bushings, bearings, axles, gear working surfaces, and such.
I am by no means an authority on this, but my feeling is that the cam-ramps at the ends of the guards are rather gross in their angle, and they probably cause a hefty lateral jolt to the trucks encountering them, particularly at speeds nearing 20 scale mph. Since so many of us can’t resist running our toy trains about three times faster, it should be little wonder that we see many more problems developing in running performance.
If everything I had seemed to be reasonable as a match, then I would take a file and try to improve the angle of those cams, those kinks at the ends of the guards. It wouldn’t take much of a change, maybe even 4 degrees, to get quite a bit of improvement.
Of course, wheel gauges could be the cause, and that should not be overlooked.
Crandell
Two words: Wheel Gauge.
Get an NMRA standards gauge, and check the spread on your engine’s wheels. While the Atlas c80 track is built with a good degree of tolerance, those old beaters are probably all over the place in terms of gauge.
Once you check that out, and make the necessary adjustments, you’ll probably see a significant improvement without having to tear up the track.
If the engines are hopping off at several locations, the engine’s wheels are the problem, not the track. If multiple pieces of rolling stock are hopping off at the same location, then the problem is the track.
Personally, I would invest in some newer locomotives that will run more reliably.
Lee