Everybody’s always talking about cork or WS foam or AMI roadbed here. Why isn’t Vinylbed ever discussed? Seems like it would be so much better than any of the above. I bought a bunch of cork recently because I had forgotten about Vinylbed and I’m sorry I did. Website is www.vinylbed.com.
George
Your link doesn’t work. If you take he period off and paste it, it works. Here’s the link;
It looks like good stuff. I’ve never heard of it, but I think it sounds worthy of further investigation.
I would be concerned with using it for one reason in particular. It goes down in one piece which essentially prevents you from following a center line that most people draw to help locate their track…although one can provide an alternate way of denoting the track location to accomidate this part of installation. It is less expensive than the competing Homabed. It may be quieter than homasote which once ballasted does become a sounding board like most other materials do. But I never heard from an actual user to verify any of this.
Bob
I used it on my S gauge layout and I am satisfied. It does a great job of sound deading, goes down super easy. It is very forgiving when cutting because it will strech and compress a bit. If you don’t like how it went down you can take it up and reuse it. Start and stop pieces under a rail tie especially when going into a curve to hold the end securly as you work around the curve. To match curves you streach it to the radius and as you’re keeping it taught tack down the track. The inside radius will bunch if you’re not careful. Tack down the track evenly, as the material is very compressable and the track may become uneven. It comes in ~ 35" strips. I have the track leads soldered to the bottom rails so I used grey wire made a slit in the center and pushed the leads through a drilled hole in the tabletop and the roadbed closed up nicely around the wires.
Jim
I decided to use Vinylbed on our new layout because I thought it seemed pretty neat based on the samples I had seen. While I did order some and have been happy with it so far, there are a few small problems that you have to deal with in addition to the ones mentioned.
One of them is that you must order it by the case and wait a number of weeks to get it since almost all of it is “made to order.” While that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it can be if you are building a small layout and come up only a piece or two short and don’t want to to order another case and wait a good 5-6 weeks.
The other problem is, since vinylbed is made from recycled vinyl, the texture varies from batch to batch. I had some pieces that were pretty firm, which made them easy to cut and to drill holes through for wires. But other pieces were very spongy, making them a real pain to cut (even with a new very sharp knife) and to drill.
The color can also vary between batches. Now, obviously that won’t matter once the track is ballasted, but I have some off-layout trackage that isn’t ballasted and I wanted it to all match.
On the good side, I used it around some very tight curves and it laid flat despite being wider than two-piece cork roadbed.
So far, it has worked just fine, but I think you should know about the issues I mentioned above since they are unique to vinylbed as far as I know.
Jim
Jim
Thanks for your user report - particularly on the variability of texture. On another forum, Vinylbed was highly recommended by a user - put on the same level or above as Homasote - as a roadbed for handlaid spiked track. The key issue for roadbed for handlaid spiked track is that the material be soft enough to drive spikes without curling too many, yet at the same time holding the spikes in place permanently afterwards. Soft wood or luaun plywood, which is used by quite a few, seems to vary in texture also - you will hit some harder spots that will curl your spikes. Your report indicates the vinylbed has the opposite problem, that it will be too soft (spongy) in places to hold everything in alignment correctly.
Thanks again for the review.
Fred Wright