I was surprised, on this my first attempt at a layout, to find a section of track that has buckled. It’s on a passenger train siding and I’m not sure what the best way to correct it is.
Would it be best to cut a small gap right where the soldered track joiners are, right about where the red shaded area is? I don’t have one of those solder sucker devices, so making the cut there I’d have a time getting the old joiners off the ends.
or would it be best to cut out a larger section of track, more like the area in red shown below…
I’m leaning toward the second method but would like to get suggestions from those with more experience.
There are track feeders in both directions about 18 to 20 inches from the buckled area.
Any advice on how to do this, step by step if you have the time, would be appreciated.
Mornin’ JaRRell. While any of those methods will work, I would go with the first one. If you cut where the joints are, you can easily remove the joiners. Just heat the joint and quickly pull of the joiner pieces with a pair of needle nose pliers. Most of the solder will come off with the joiner pieces. At worst you will have to remove the rest of the solder with the dremel if you can’t get track joiners in place. This time don’t solder that joint but leave a 1/16" gap. If you cut the rail apart with a dremel using cut off wheel, the gap should be perfect. A much more important job is to find why the track buckled in the first place and correct the situation if possible. This is the reason you hear recommendations not to solder all the track joints. Good luck!
Step 1: Go buy a solder sucker. They’re cheap. Sooner or later, it will come in handy even if you don’t use it right away.
Step 2: Figure out what caused the track to buckle. If you’ve got a humidity problem that’s expanding and contracting your layout base, then it’s going to happen again. From the picture, it looks like the base has shrunk, making the track too long for the space it’s in, hence the buckle. But, if you put track down while the wood is like this and it expands again when the monsoon season comes back, then the track will be too short and it will pop apart.
Step 3: Cut out the whole “red zone”, plus a few inches on either side, all the way back to where it’s completely straight. Don’t try to straighten the bent track - you’ll never get it right again. Cut a piece of flex track to fit, and remove two ties on one end and three on the other. On the 3-ties-gone end, push new rail joiners all the way on, and then you can drop the track in place without bending it to get the joiners in. Once the track is down, slide the joiners back to cover the joint.
I forgot to add that I’m not sure exactly what caused this, other than the track maybe fit a bit tooooo tight right from the beginning. The layout is in a insulated room that is heated and cooled via a wall unit. It did rain most of the day yesterday so I’m not sure if moisture was the problem (from me going in and out the door) or a fluctuation in temperature, or both. The track is sitting on cork roadbed, which is glued to 2 inch extruded foam, that is glued to a plywood benchtop. The electric heat unit is wall mounted under the layout, the type that I call a motel unit, heat and ac in one unit. While it doesn’t send out what I’d call HOT air, it is warm and it’s postion is roughly 3 or 4 feet from this bad track area. I have no idea if it had any bearing on the problem or not. Maybe it was a combination of things, moisture from the outside coming in when I went in and out the door, heat from the unit, track laid with not enough gap, soldered connections… A PERFECT STORM.
I’d go with Howmus. Cut the rail at the joiners with your Xuron or equivalent cutters. Fast and easy. Then heat the ends till the joiners slide off.Straighten the rail and lay the ends along side each other so you can see how much to remove. Cut out the extra length. File the rail ends smooth removing any burrs or excess solder that might be in the way of sliding on new joiners.Remove any ties in the way of new joiners. Slide new joiners on the rails past the joint. Put the rail ends back together. Slide the joiners across the joint. At this point you can leave them soldered or unsoldered and observe any movement over the next few days or weeks,sI’d probably leave specially if youv’e got good feeders on both sides of the joint. Also its a good idea to take a small section of tie strip, remove the cast on spike heads and slide under the joint. This adds a little support to the joint and greatly improves the looks. Also run your finger along the joint and feel for any bumbs,snags or irregularities and file them smooth.
It has always amazed me the tiny amout of pressure that will make track buckle. I am guessing as little as 1/32"-3/64" expansion could cause that huge bulge. Normally I would recommend getting a thin bladed saw (Atlas track saw, or a Dremmel thin saw blade - not a cut off disk they are way too fat) and just put a single cut through the most stressed rail. If that doesn’t work then also cut the second rail in a slightly offset position. However one can’t just cut gaps where there are no ties to hold the rail in place, so with that gaping hole in the ties it might be better to redo the entire joint. Cut out the section that doesn’t have ties (what happened to them anyway?) and replace it with some track that does - fix two problems at once. Maybe you could slide some ties from another piece of track onto this section.
This is one reason I do not solder things, because things like this are much easier to fix when not soldered.
Hello “JaRRell,” We had some similar buckling in the staging yard on our MR&T club layout – 12 tracks worth! The rail joints were all soldered, so I used a cutting disk in a motor tool to cut through the rails right at a joint on each track. In most cases that was sufficient to relieve the pressure and let the track straighten out. If not, I just sliced off a little bit more of the rail. Then I heated and removed the remains of the cut-through, soldered rail joiners, We hadn’t used a lot of solder in the first place, so there wasn’t much if any excess solder to remove. I replaced the joiners with new ones but didn’t solder them. I did make sure we had track feeders to each rail on either side of the unsoldered joints, as it doesn’t do to trust loose rail joiners to carry current, especially when using DCC. By the way, our layout room has the same controlled climate as our offices, so the buckling must have been caused by shrinkage as the benchwork lumber dried out. We did have some buckling caused by rail expansion on our previous layout in downtown Milwaukee, but that was because the afternoon sun came in a window and heated the rail – a real-life sun kink! The solution in that case was to install some stout window shades, and our new layout room doesn’t have any windows. So long, Andy
Based on what I am seeing in this thread, and what I have seen in the past, what is the feasability of building in “expansion joints”? Or is this something already being done that I have missed? I will be laying track within a couple of months (if not sooner) and have already considered this. We may be moving back to central Texas, and there is a good possibility that my layout may end up in a garage, and I have concerns about heat expasion, just like the prototype (heat kinks).
As mentioned above, would a few small cuts in the rail here and there be sufficient to help avoid this, or is it more trouble than it is worth?
Since smooth trackwork is the single most important component to a good running layout, I don’t recommend cutting corners and trying to rework a warped or seriously messed up track joint. I just replace the section of track with new track (cut out about 6-12" of the existing track), and lay it right the second time.
By laying it right, I mean leaving expansion gaps in the track. One business card thickness per joint is sufficient. Don’t solder all your rail joints or you could be sorry. You need places where the track can “breathe” by sliding around a bit in the joiners.
You can solder every other rail joint if you want (I do this on curves to minimize kinks), but then you should leave two business card thicknesses of gap at the joints with the rails lose in the joiner. [swg]
Unless you are used to making this repair, it is usually better to replace a section of track than to try to repair a buckled joint. You will have a difficult time getting the rails perfectly straight and cut to the proper length, especially if one or both rails have kinks in them.
Removing a section of track will remove the buckled and kinked portion entirely. When you replace the section, you may want to solder only one end and leave the other end unsoldered until you are sure the track won’t buckle again. I doubt that it will, since your base is foam and foam doesn’t expand and contract enough to cause this problem. Leaving one end of your patched section solder-free will allow a gap for expansion. When you are sure the problem has been solved, you can go back and solder the last connections.
As to why it buckled in the first place, it may be all those soldered joints. When rail expands, it has to go somewhere. When soldered rail expands, it forces the entire soldered section to move. Buckling will occur at the weakest section of track, often on a straight section or in a soldered joint on a curve.
I appreciate all the suggestions. As with most things in model railroading, I have learned, there are umpteen ways to do the job, you just go with the one that you feel the most comfortable with.
I went with Mr. Beasley’s method on this job but if it happens again in another spot, I’ll try cutting at the rail joint and removing the soldered on joiner.
This time I cut out a section about 14 inches long and then I under cut the rails in order to leave the ties on. I was going to remove the tires completely but couldn’t figure a way to get to the little piece of plastic cut away from the bottom of the Atlas flex track, the piece that connects the ties on one side. I finally managed to get a flexible utility knife blade under some and hobby saw under other parts in order to cut thru the rail ‘spikes’ so that I could get joiners on and shoved back down the rail far enough out of my way.
I left about 1/16th gap between rails this time, NOT butted right up to each other. I’m just glad it was on a straight section right up front for easy access. I can see where that would be a bad job in a yard next to a turnout, or if the area was set back on the backside and had already been sceniked.
Any way I gained more experience if nothing else. Oh… I did gain something else… it works…
Not aiming to be controversial but i really don’ understand why you guys solder rail joints.
At least with UK track mainly Peco) I’ve never soldered a joint and would never expect to.
What I do, do is
use the sleepers (ties) to locate the track securely with enough pins driven through clearance holes drilled usually mid tie (very occasionally two pins in a tie) into very small pilot holes drilled in the baseboard - previously fibre board, then MDF … in future I think it will be high quality ply.
if the ties can’t hold the rails in position I’m simply asking too much curve from the system.
use Peco rail joiners… either metal or insulated.
fit all individual lengths of rail with drop wires that can be linked or put through their own switching (electrical).
Oh, yeah… maybe back at the start… I locate all rail joints where there will be the least load from either horizontal or vertical curves.
With this metod the track has a measure of flex available within it and, even when modelling in an uninsulated loft, I’ve never had distortion problems… frozen fingers some months and meltdown others but no wiggly track.
Atlas flextrack on curves needs to have the joints soldered, or kinks are almost guaranteed. It does not hold its shape the way that I have heard Peco does. On the straights it isn’t nearly as needed, and maybe some of us should think about that a bit.
I agree on rethinking the part about not soldering on straight track. I can’t use nails to secure the track onto extruded foam so I have to rely on caulking or glue. I know that in the future especially on straight stretches where there is a drop feeder on every section, I won’t solder the joiners. But, I know my luck… if it didn’t have a feeder and I was depending on the rail joiners to conduct electricity… like I said, I know my luck.
I solder curves so they’re smooth. At the ends of the curve I leave slight gaps between the rail ends. I’ve never soldered straight sections. I’ve never had a problem, either, with conductivity. I DID have a bit of a problem due to humidity swings in my basement, but a dehumidifier in summer and a humidifier in winter controls the air enough to avoid that.
The room my layout is in just about had me convinced that I would be immune to track contraction/expansion related problems.
This little episode un-convinced me of that notion.
If I build another layout one day, I won’t solder each and every rail joiner. Instead I’ll do those were conditions call for it, such as on curves. I’ll make sure track feeders are to every unsoldered section and to at least every other soldered section.
'Course, on my next layout there’s quite a few things I’ll do differently… [:)]
Jacon12: With your track on cork which is glued to extruded foam, you can rule out expansion due to humidity, since neither of these materials are affected by it. Almost certainly, you’re dealing with thermal expansion. If you laid it very tightly, and have a heater as close as 3-4 feet, well…, bingo! I would agree with any of the methods suggested to repair the situation, though, since the track is not ballasted, I would just replace the warped area, rather than trying to straighten it…
On the mention of expansion joints earlier in this thread, they’re easy to make:
