track cleaning car kits

[Anonymous]

anyone know a good place i can pick up one of those kits where you drill holes in the floor of a boxcar and have the cleaning pad hanging down

[Anonymous]

It seems like I once saw one of those boxcar types in the Walthers catalog . I once had one that was a caboose and didn't care for it. I could never get enough pressure on the pad to really do any good. If I did get the right amount of pressure on the pad, then it would cause it to derail. So I just use an erasor to clean the track whenever it needs it. I clean the wheels of my engines with a Kadee electric wheel cleaner.

[Eriediamond]

Yep, been there done that Georgaboy. My solution was to add some stick on weights to the car. Didn't look pretty, but got the job done. Didn't run it in a train, just used it for track cleaning only. Ken

[Anonymous]

I think they suggested a way of making these in MR a few months ago - they drilled holes in the base of a boxcar, glued a piece of hardboard to a couple of 6in nails, and poked the nails through the holes - there was no weight on the "cleaning pad" other than its own and the weight of the nails. I've not tried this as I use a Peco track cleaner block, but it would have the advantage of being able to remove the pad easily. I guess if you ran a car in every train fitted out like this it would help keep track clean, but I suspect fitting metal wheels to everything and cleaning the track manually would be more effective.

[retsignalmtr]

i bought a 4"x8" sheet of 1/4" masonite for my skyboard. with the leftover scraps i made pads to fit under ho cars that i drilled holes in the floors. then i epoxyied 1&1/4" roofing nails to the masonite pads. when the pads get dirty rubbing them on fine sandpaper cleans them off. a sheet of 1/4 masonite runs around $11. for my n scale layout i need 1/8 masonite. i should be able to make 10,000 pads. the pads do not need to be weighted to work right. they just slide on the rails. and they do work very well.