My Kato SD-40’s are about the poorest tracking things I have. No, scratch that, they ARE the poorest tracking things I have!
My Broadway Limited C&O T1 2-10-4 Not only will find gauge problems
but if the track is not dead level approaching a turn out the rear of the loco will
sit down and the front will rise derailing the front trucks and off you go.
Things can change on a layout after you lay the track
I put in a road alongside the track and the water from the plaster caused the
homasote to swell raising one of the turnouts
The T-1 found it first time around
Just out of curiosity (and admiration for that beautiful loco) what IS the minimum radius on your 4-12-2?
Tom
Tom,
I found out that anything under a 46" radius will cause the engine to bind, and you can hear it. The club layout has nothing under that. It can run free there. The engine did come with 2 sets of “Blind” drivers, but I didn’t install them.
Brass steamers in general are a good track test vehicle, but I would guess that 4-12-2 takes the prize, especially with no blind drivers. I used to have several brass Class A 2-6-6-4s and a few 2-8-8-2s, but my whipping boy now is a brass J 4-8-4. It is just a hair pickier than the 4-8-2. Steam engines in general make diesels mere child’s play in my opinion, relative to trackwork anyway.
That UP 4-12-2 was originally built with #4 driver blind. The UP found it unnecessary, but their curves were a lot wider than ours are.
My, ‘Designated trackwork tester,’ locomotive is C50380, a hybrid (brass superstructure, cast white metal frame) 1:80 scale 2-8-2 manufactured in the 1960’s. It has unweighted pilot and trailing trucks and a featherweight tender and will find any defect in a heartbeat. Among freight cars, my, ‘best of the worst,’ is a rigid-frame 6-wheel flat car with pizza cutter wheels. If the superelevation isn’t VERY smooth and VERY gradual, it’s on the ties!
OTOH, all of my passenger stock, even the DMU and EMU cars, can accept almost anything except curves under 550mm radius. If a passenger car derails, the track is REALLY bad.
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
Welll, I suppose a lot of it depends on the scale you’re working in… something folks should try to remember to mention.
In N scale, one of the track testing champions is the Kato PA-1.
[#ditto] A monster locomotive like a UP 9000 4-12-2 is going to find tight curvature and/or turnout problems. It might also be good to find areas where the grade changes too abruptly. It might even find S-curve problems, but are those really problems, or just things that are “too small” for that particular locomotive?
I have a set of FTs who’s trucks are mounted so tight they will find any slight dip in the track. At the club this summer someone tested and tested track with B truck locomotives thinking they would have the hardest problem with stalling et.al. But as soon as the track was put into service a C trucked loco (Proto SD9) couldn’t get through the area. So I think the question is all track should be tested with a “set” of locomotives representing short and long wheel bases, various configurations of trucks, AND having them connected to cars of different lengths both in both pulling and pushing scenarios.