A recent poster said that he pre curved every inch of his rail before spiking it down and in no way relyed on the spikes to hold the rail side to side. How is this done?
With a rail bender, of course.
Yes, I think jktrains is quite correct…I believe that you can get them elsewhere, but Fast Tracks sells them as a suggested implement for the smaller frog numbered turnouts where the curvatures are quite steep. Tim Warris shows how he bends the point stock through his fingers when making the higher #'d turnouts since the curves are lighter.
It takes some practise.
If you don’t want to prebend the rail, don’t worry about it. I have been laying track and switches for over 30 years, have never prebent the rail (don’t personally know anybody that prebends the rail) and have never had any problems with the rail coming loose. Some of the switches I built in the late 1970’s are still being used by a club back in Pennsylvania so they are in the neighborhood of 30+ years old.
Its not a bad idea, but its certainly not a requirement.
Dave H.
I pre-bend rail (both the pieces of hand-laid specialwork and flex that will be laid on curves) because I use a base that isn’t too capable of dealing with lateral stress. Un-prepared rail MIGHT stay put forever. Pre-bent rail WILL stay where I intended it to be.
My rail-bending tool is the infamous 0-5-0, sometimes supplemented with long-nose pliers at the extreme end(s) of a length of rail.
Even Atlas code 100 flex can be pre-bent. I’ve discovered that bending it (carefully! DON’T let it twist) to about four inch radius will allow it to relax to something under 24 inch radius. Easing it out to 610mm (24 inch) or 670mm radius is a lot easier (for me) than trying to convince straight sections to assume the desired curvature.
Just my [2c]. Different opinions have been posted.
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
The only time you’d be better off pre-bending rail is for the larger sizes such as codes 215, 250, or 332.
I’m with Chuck - not to say other methods don’t work. If I pre-bend the rail, I don’t need ugly railjoiners and the accompanying recesses on the ties, soldered joints, or any other contraption to hold rail alignment on curves. Just the spikes do fine. I can add prototypical joint bars without interference from rail jointers.
I have heard of shortening rail joiners by half to get rid of some of the problems - I hadn’t thought of that before, and I may experiment with that. But unless soldered, rail joiners seem like a poor long-term solution for both mechanical track alignment and electrical connectivity.
In the past, I bent the rail the same way Chuck does - 0-5-0, with pliers for the very ends. I was not happy with the pliers technique using code 70 rail - it was too easy to kink instead of curve. Of course, the kinking could have just been my ham-fistedness. [:O] I imagine the susceptibility to kinking will be much worse with the planned code 55 and 40 rail on my upcoming layout.
This next time around, I will try a rail bender for the sharper curves and simply cut off the last unbent 1/2" or so.
yours in beautiful track
Fred W