My grandfather’s layout had a massive water leak via the ceiling, And I’m wondering what protocols would be taken immediately to a few days after the incident. I’m currently unsure on the wetness of the layout and trains.
1 Like
My immediate advice would be the ‘big bag of rice’ treatment, to pull water out of all the nooks and crannies in the electrics or corrodable parts (including de facto galvanic couples) as quickly as possible.
An alternative might be partial disassembly before ‘ricing’.
You could use commercial desiccants as an alternative if you have them on hand or want to order them (for example as sold for ‘safe’ long-term firearm storage).
I would recommend careful disassembly for cleaning and re-lubrication in any case before you power up or operate equipment. In the olden days it was sometimes common practice to start with lower than operating voltage (for example as with vacuum-tube filaments) and slowly increase to nominal while watching for imminent release of magic smoke.
You may want to take the opportunity to clean and ‘gleam’ the track when you are reasonably sure everything around it is dry.
4 Likes
Also, Is there anything that should/could be done for scenery and/Or DCC System? It might have some water on the controller itself. Inner unit should be okay, However I do believe there was an Open proto RDC that potentially could have water, but it’s pretty unlikely.
If in doubt… give it the full bag/desiccant treatment.
The one place that might pose a more immediate need for remediation is if you have devices with keep-alives. These need to be more aggressively dried and accessed as even a small ‘short’ can cause significant active trouble. Take the shell off and blow the works out with dry compressed air or gas, and disconnect the keep-alive device from the circuit board if that can be done.
Scenery and bench work will probably depend on your method of construction and materials.