Recently I noticed that some nickle silver rail I had spiked down with steel spikes had a white corrosion growing where the 2 met. Any thoughts? Dehumidify the basement?
JD
[#welcome] Howdy, new poster.
Sounds like you have something going on with an electrolyte present. What did you use to color your ties? If you have true galvanic corrosion, you will have to dehumidify your layout space down to the level I achieve in my Mojave Desert garage to inhibit it.
Wish I could be more helpful, but there isn’t much to be done if you’ve inadvertently built a trackful of micro-battery cells.
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - with painted, unstained, wood ties)
A dehumidifier in a basement with a layout is always a swell idea.
JD:
I have heard of this happening before with handlaid track on wooden ties. It was in a letter to MR. I think they blamed the tie stain, but I forget what this stain was.
I don’t think the corrosion will hurt anything, but if it’s too unsightly, paint the track rust color and cover it up.
Sounds like an issue I had 45 years ago on my handlaid track. I had used a common dye to color the ties that was salt-based and which caused corrosion like you describe around the spikes. Fortunately, the problem didn’t cause any difficulty the time the layout existed (four years), but then I lived in a relatively dry climate. I’ve learned to be a bit more choosey when selecting stain for ties.
Perhaps there is some kind of chemical solution that could be applied to neutralize the salts if indeed that is the cause. Are there any good chemists out there?
Mark
Back in the sixties this issue came up more than once in letters to the editor in the hobby press and one was discouraged from using Rit dyes which, it was alleged, was the cause of this corrosion. I don’t know whether that was the actual cause of the problem or not and, if so, if that problem might still exist but I have always avoided using those dyes as a tie-stain because of those allegations.
Yup. Rit was the dye that caused my corrosion problem.
Mark