I’ve been trying desparately to find curved rerailer tracks and all I can find online and off are those stupid tracks with the plastic roadbedding. Do they still make them in just regular track?
Not sure what you mean by plastic roadbedding.
Curved rerailers are harder to find than straight rerailers. {the kind with teh “wooden slat looking insert of plastic” to get/keep RR cars on the track.}
I have one Atlas one I found in a “junk track” box that is actually steel I think and not NS. The hobby shop owner didn’t charge me to take it off his hands while I bought other stuff. SInce my trains only run over the one piece, the current seems to be steady through it with the NS all around. I wish I had about 2 more pieces, but can’t seem to find the curved ones anywhere anymore. At least not in Atlas trackage.
It’s not difficult to make your own rerailer, anywhere that you have a road crossing at grade or a legitimate need for guardrails. Just look at the geometry of the plastic sectional track product, then reproduce it with full-height rail bent into guard rails and ramps of ground goop, styrene, card stock, plaster or whatever.
Rerailers can be inserted anywhere, on tangents, curves of any radius and even in spiral easements or the non-moving parts of turnouts. If you build your own they can go over sectional track, flex or hand-laid with equal lack of difficulty.
Some prototype railroads even rigged the ends of bridge guard rails as full-scale rerailers, taking advantage of the same geometrical design. It’s a safe bet they were assembled on-site, from whatever was available.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - with rerailers at every grade crossing, bridge abutment and tunnel portal)
Here is a prototype “rerailer” on a curve, over a bridge no less.
Mark
in all my years of railroading i never saw a rerailer built into the track structure sometimes you might get lucky if only one wheel set was on the ground and it would hop back on when you pulled it through a trailing point switch or over a road crossing before you knew about it. but that was a crap shoot. it happens in HO scale a lot more than it does in the real world. the only way to rerail anything without jacks or a crane is to use frogs made especially for that purpose and some hardwood blocks and wedges. the car department has truck loads of these. you must get both wheels including their flanges up to and over the top of the rail
if one wheel is inside the gauge of the rail then the other one will be on the outside. (unless the rails have spread) flanges will not climb back up and over the rail on their own. about all you will do is tear the track up even more and get the section men really honked off.
as for the photo of the curved “rerailer”, its just a set of guard rails to keep derailed cars from falling off the bridge. if the guard rails were arranged to crowd a derailed car back on to the track then about all you would accomplish would be to turn the rail over and create a bigger screw up. instead of just being on the ground, you would be all over the *$%%*ing ground. (big four speak)
some engines and cabooses had rerailing frogs hung under their side sills for emergency use but you had to know what you were doing and get lucky to boot. otherwise a crew could just make things a lot worse than they already were. don’t ask how i know this.
grizlump
Grizlump’s comments explain why I put “rerailer” in quotes. My point was that one can create a functioning rerailer that can look much like a prototype installation as had been pointed out earlier.
if you guys want to hear a funny story about trying to rerail cars;
nyc lower yard - e st louis - late 60’s. we were going to deliver about 25 or 30 cars to the TRRA yard near relay depot and the rear car was one of those depressed center transformer flats with more wheels under it than most big four employees could count. since we had no cab, we were all on the engine when someone noticed a small dust cloud just after we started out. the conductor and i walked back and saw that one axle of that rear car was off the rails. he said, “i’ve dealt with these before, they will climb back on at the first switch” well, this one didn’t and after he had waved a highball and we had climbed back on the car instead of watching things from the ground like we should have, (I was green and the Conductor was drunk) the engineer just took off and never looked back. that car got to bouncing so bad we both jumped off and neither of us thought of setting the air from the rear anglecock. we just watched it go up the outbound lead, taking out every switch stand (about 15 of them) in the process. when that big son of a gun started tearing up the pot signals and switch machines in Q tower’s plant it hopped around enough to break the train line and they went into emergency and stopped
poor George Ivory, the section foreman, had to drive all the way to Terre Haute to get enough material to repair all those switches since the other local railroads had become reluctant to lend us anything else. (you are supposed to pay them back) and the Terminal Railroad Association estimated the damage to their plant at fifty grand.
naturally we all got one of those letters that starts out “arrange to appear in the office of the Terminal Superintendent at 9:00 AM on whatever day for a formal investigation to determine the facts and your responsibility, if any, concerning blah blah blah” i think they listed about 10 rule violations and the bottom line was
Every hobby shop I know of carries this new track with a simulated gravel-ballast molded onto the tracks. They come in two colors; gray and black. I think it looks too uniform and therefore too toyish, because it’s plastic and not acual gravel. I want to do my own ballast using actual HO scaled gravel.
It’s not hard to find track, switches, crossings etc. without the plastic ballast, but never a curved rerailer. They always have curved rerailers - plenty of them - but only in the simulated ballast. Here’s a picture of the kind of track I’m talking about. Note: These are not rerailers, but they feature the gray plastic roadbed I’m referring to.
Thanks for the story, Grizlump. I enjoyed that.
Are you looking for something like this: http://cgi.ebay.com/18-NICKEL-SILVER-TERMINAL-TRACK-CURVED-RERAILER-/140419352000 ??
Not that I have any thing against rerailers god knows I have enough of them in hidden staging in my o/p thats where they belong or on hidden track. As mentioned with some work you can disguise one of the premade ones as a grade crossing or as mentioned make your own grade crossing but I would taper the center wood or concrete section rather then install a safety rail such as was described used on bridge track. Other then at a crossing you would never see anything like that on the prototype, at l;east not that I’ve ever seen. If your having derailment issues on the curve maybe you need to go back and inspect your track work.
Maxman, it’s not exactly what I had in mind, but it’s actually better. Thanks.
Allegheny, yeah I need them for my tunnels, where they wouldn’t be seen and of course where a train can’t be rescued so easily. I like the one Maxman showed me, because they aren’t crossings. Those would be perfect for my tunnel and I would use the kind that are disguised as railroad crossings outside tunnels.
You should still have some type of access opening for the tunnel and not just rely on a rerailer. If you lay your track well you won’t have many derailments but the few you have will be in the most inaccessible part of the layout. [:)]
Keep in mind a rerailer can cause a derailment if you have a car with too low a Kadee “hose” hanging down.
Never know when you’ll have a bug or something in the tunnel. A recent thread was about a kangaroo rat in a tunnel. That could cause a derailment. [:-^]
You just have to pick your prototype with care. 1960s Japanese practice had a LOT of plain gravel grade crossings where the flangeways were kept clear with lengths of steel rail set to turnout guard rail specs and tapered together like bridge guard rails. As for wood, asphalt or concrete road surfaces, those little country lanes never heard of 'em.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
Micro Engineering makes flexible bridge track that comes with a separate pair of safety rails which are code 70 on their code 83 track you have to glue the safety rails to the ties using C/A. So simply all you need to do is go to your LHS or an online store that sells rails for hand laying track. Pick yourself up a pair of in your case code 83 rails the next size down from code 100 and curve then using the existing rail itself nad glue them in place.
FYI: a little hint NEVER! make the inside of a tunnel nonacessable, if you have to make a removeable secton that can be covered by ground cover, trees bushes etc. it’s worth the extra effort.We have a tunnel at the club that is almost 15 feet long and it can be acessed form either underneath or by removing the backdrop panel. TTrust me and you can take this to the bank, if you don’t gauranteed that your train will always give you problems right there. That guy Murphy will set loose one of his cangaroo rats on ya.
The tunnel in my layout plans is actually a semi-circle that is covered by a top tier with another railroad line laying atop it. What I failed to mention is that the edge of the layout where the submerged semi-circle will be will have two doors that open up so I can clean the track when needed and rerail the trains by hand. It is out of sheer laziness that I want the rerailers inside this area of submerged track so I don’t have to get up and rerail it myself. I had also planned to have rerailers disguised as railroad crossings and now I’m looking into the piece of track that Maxman showed me.
Thanks to all of you for your help. [swg]
Btw, the track I am referring to is called E-Z Track and is manufactured by Bachman, but I’m sure other companies make the same kind of track. It has simulated plastic roadbed and snaps together easily, hence the name. Sounds great, I know, but I personally hate it, because it doesn’t look real. It’s great for toy train layouts and for kids, but not mine.