Question & Answer of the Week - September 9, 2005

Classic Toy Trains Forum
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From the pages of CLASSIC TOY TRAINS magazine, Ray L. Plummer and the CTT staff offer a Question & Answer of the week.

“Cold time on the layout tonight”

http://www.trains.com/Content/Dynamic/Articles/000/000/006/152umphd.asp

This question has to do with trains running in an unheated environment. Something I’ve been wondering about, myself. Mr. Plummer gives the answer I was hoping for.

Jim

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Jim, I’ll add to this that a friend of mine has a layout in a garage, that is connected to the house but with no direct heat. He uses tubular tack, and likes his electric K-Line switches over Lionel ones. But we’ve both noticed how they work very sluggishly in the cold. Very often you need to go over and turn them manually.

May just be a glitch with this type of switch. As mentioned, humidity and dampness are the number one enemy. If I were building a layout in a garage, I’d at least go to the trouble to insulate the garage as I best as possible first.

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Thanks, Brian. My layout is in a basement that does have electric heat, but obviously, only when I turn it on. The rest of the time, the basement stays somewhere in the low to mid 50’s during the winter. I was a little nervous about what those temps would do to the electronics.

Brian, on another subject, how realistic would you rate the sounds on MRC’s Soundstation 312? You recommended this set to me a while back and I’m giving serious thought to picking one up. How does it compare to Railsound’ recordings for example?

Jim

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Jim, The Soundstation is pretty nice - you get two speakers with the hand-held unit - the running sounds do not synch with the train like with Railsounds. But I like the sounds anyway - I can’t remember if you can overlay them. I have an even older MRC Soundmaster - with just steam chuff/ diesel motor; whistle / horn which works great. I can manually synch the sounds with the train running and working the whistle horn slide is just great fun.

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Thanks for replying, Doug. According to MRC’s web site, you can overlay some sounds on top of chuffing or diesel motor running, like a horn, whistle, bell. Since syncronized sound isn’t all that important to me or the kids, as long as it sounds good, I might just order one of these.

Jim

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Jaabat, temperatures in the 50’s shouldn’t affect the electronics at all. Think of all the electronics in our cars - they endure great temperature extremes and keep on working. Closer to home, my train room has dropped into the upper 30’s many times during past winters, with no ill effects on the trains’ electronics. Like their prototypes, though, the mechanicals get sluggish when they’re that cold. I try to warm the room up to at least 55 before I run them.

Joel

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Thanks for the input, Joel.

Jim