"Jostling thru' turnouts" - Selector?

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I thought this deserved a new thread - In a response to Hazmat9's track issues, Selector said:

> Don't worry, Hazmat. My stuff all jostles because I am using commercial turnouts. I
> have tried grinding down the flangeways in the frogs, but I may be doing more
> harm than good if the fellow at Fast Tracks is right. He says the commercial ones
> tend to rely on metal filler to help the flanges to ride throught the frog, whereas his
> handlaying method doesn't.

My stuff also jostles thru a double xover - Close inspection shows the plastic flangeways sit high, and therefore 'push' the wheels high. I was about to attack this by grinding away with the trusty Dremel, but now I'm not so sure..... "Metal filler to help the flanges ride thru the frog" is what got me - Please explain!

Walthers/Shinohara HO T/O's BTW.

Thx,
Ian

[selector]

Someone posted a link recently to the Fast Tracks site, and I watched his hour-long video on how to hand-lay turnouts. He mentions that his turnouts are properly geometrically proportioned so that the train wheels ride properly through the frog and don't need the fillers that commercial manufacturers seem to use. Then he showed how well his turnouts work by running a four-wheeled truck back and forth...darned if they weren't sikly smooth!

You and I use commercial sectional track switches and we see the results. You see that your frogs are all metal and filled in the flangeways. I think some of the flanges make contact with the metal filler. Not all of my rolling stock does that, but some pieces do, and most of my steamer tenders rock, too. So, that filler is too high in some turnouts for some items.

One other possibility is that the wheels in some axles are not well positioned on the axle itself, and they may be swiping either the guard rails or the frog rails. That is worth investigating, too. So, the wheel spacing may gauge out correctly, but if both wheels are too far to one side of the axle, then they will not line up with the wheels in front and behind them when the item is trying to make its straight path through the frog.

If you have 95 minutes some evening, go to the Fast Tracks site (proudly Canadian!), and watch his turnout-building video online. I learned more in that hour than I have learned in months of tweaking track.

[Anonymous]

Thanks!

Sounds like an hour or two will be well spent on his site sometime soon. (Hope it doesn't get overloaded :-)

However, I'm still not getting why I can't simply grind away the high points at the bottom of the flangeways - You said this may be doing more harm than good as the filler helps (in commercial to's anyway) the wheels thru the frog - OK, but in this case they're hindering, not helping, and I'm not seeing the reason a carefully applied grinding wheel would not make matters better - But, I haven't yet fired up the Dremel......

I guess the answer's in the video, and your response may certainly tell me that (!), but it's too late to start into that now, and I wanted to thank you for the initial response.

Cheers,
Ian

[cmrproducts]

I did a lot of research on the Atlas turnouts and found that the frog area is out of gauge according to the NMRA gauge. The flange gap is wide and this allows the engine and car wheels to drop down into the gap.

I hand lay turnouts on my home layout for special applications and the frog area does not have this problem on the hand laid turnouts due to the narrower gap at the frog.

Now you had better have every car and engine wheel in perfect gauge or you will have derailments on and off. Once the wheels are in gauge no more problems!

Now what to do with the Atlas, besides pulling them out, is to fill in the bottom of the frog.

Yes, this is not the way it is supposed to be but then who is going to throw away 150 turnouts. It is either that or just live with the cars wobbling through the Atlas turnouts.

Using thin strip styrene you can super glue the strips into the bottoms of the frogs and then the wheels will ride on the styrene when they go to drop into the gap at the frog.

Now if you do not have all the same size flanges on your rolling stock, they will jump up instead of dropping down through this modified frog. You can’t win!

BOB H – Clarion, PA

[HAZMAT9]

Man o' man what a mess! I'm running 20 or so Atlas switches on my main layout, maybe I need to scratch build for my street-running/yard portion of my layout which still needs to be tracked. I'll have to watch the video, can't go through life biting my nails everytime the train pushes through the switches.....I'm running out of nails! [^]

[TomDiehl]

QUOTE: Originally posted by cmrproducts

I did a lot of research on the Atlas turnouts and found that the frog area is out of gauge according to the NMRA gauge. The flange gap is wide and this allows the engine and car wheels to drop down into the gap.

BOB H – Clarion, PA

One of the most common problems I've found, and not just with the Atlas turnouts, is that the flangeway on the guardrail across from the frog is too wide. If you'll recall the back-to-back dimension given in the NMRA Standard s4.2 dimension B, for the wheelset, this dimension is critical to operation through the switch. If the flangeway is too wide, s3.2 Dimension S or Span, will allow the wheel running through the frog to hit the point of the frog causing more of a bounce. If the guardrail on the switch is just cast in the plastic like the ties, it's easy to fix. get a piece of .02 by .06 inch styrene strip, like Evergreen markets, and glue it to the inside of the guardrail, the part that will rub against the back of the wheel (as they're supposed to on the prototype as well as the model). File the top smooth and check with the NMRA gauge again. Trim any excess and you're ready to roll.

PS One pack of the .02 by .06 styrene strip will do hundreds of turnouts using this method.