Time for Another Disaster?

[Doughless]

I'm reasonably confident that if you added more glue and straightened the whole thing out again with weight when wet, it should dry flat again.    Most of the time you can rewet and redry roadbed and track and it turns out fine.

[richhotrain]

Pruitt

A bit earlier today I ballasted a turnout (the one in the upper left with the screwdriver next to it) that leads to Natrona Lunber to the left and the Standard Oil Company refinery tank car loading racks straight ahead. It's all the same process I used to good effect in the rest of the yard, so I had no reason to expect a problem. The turnout is ballasted, wetted with alcohol and the ballast glued with diluted white glue.

The yellow glue holding the cork down let loose and the cork wrinkled up underneath the turnout, bowing the turnout upwards in the process! Yikes!!

This has not happened anywhere else in the yard. As you can see, the ballasted turnout is near the edge of the cork right here. While track is caulked to the cork, turnouts are left floating. And this one sure floated!

I looked around for a way to flatten everything out, in the hopes that the cork will dry and not force me to pull the turnout and cut out the wavy cork and replace it all. 

I added full strength yellow glue under the edge of the wrinkled cork using a popsicle stick, then laid a 4' machined aluminum level along the track and weighted it with unspent soda cans. That seems to have flattened out things under the turnout. I also used the heavy steel ruler from my 16" combination square, along with the head of the square and a pair of medium/large dikes for weight, to flatten the loose wavy edge of the cork.

This will all stay in place for 24-36 hours to allow everything to dry thoroughly. Then we'll see what we shall see. With a bit of good luck, this will be "disaster averted."

So step right up and place your bets, folks! Whadda ya think? Will I have to rebuild that area, or will my attempt at repair prove successful? 

Personally, I'm thinking it's a toss-up. What about you? 

You will find out soon enough. If it fails, it is only one turnout. No big deal.

It's all part of the layout building process.

Rich

[selector]

Alas, this was just waiting for an excuse to happen, Mark.  And as Wayne opines, it is about 85% likely to happen again, maybe not quite as drastic or extensive.  Too much wetting on too little original glue, maybe an iffy batch of glue, cork that is more porous than the stuff around it...who knows.  This spot has an issue. 

To me, the problem is part adhesive and part too much cork. I think I would have lifted the turnout because I would have assumed I'd have to tidy up the surroundings anyway (so what's another two minutes of ballast refinishing?) and cut a thin slice of cork, maybe a couple about six inches or eight inches apart to relieve any pressure.  Those waffles or waves tell me there might be about 1/8" too much cork for that area.

It's just a SWAG on my part.  At the very least I would have used a thin spatula or butterknife to spread more glue under those wavy edges.

If it helps you to feel like you're in good company, this happened to me in my yard last summer.  I had laid all the dirt and glued it around early December of '19 so that the grandsons, who were to visit near spring break, would enjoy a finished layout.  COVID changed that.  Then in late May, I walked in to find one turnout lifted like it was an arch bridge. I had to remove it, trim 1/16" off the rails abutting the points end rails, re-insert it, and then fix and reglue the ballast and dirt.  It was a pain, but fixable over maybe 20 minutes.  Hasn't happened again.  Oh yeah, I also remembered to turn off the dehumidifier once I checked the gauge and found the normal 45% to have dropped to 25%.  Hence, the buckle.

[doctorwayne]

Pruitt

Personally, I'm thinking it's a toss-up. What about you?

I'm wondering when the cork was glued in place...did it have time to create a bond before you did the ballasting?  Most yellow glue is resistant to water, but I wonder if the alcohol played a part in the delamination.
Most of my cork roadbed was put down with yellow glue or contact cement, and a lot of it was literally drenched with "wet water" during ballasting, due to the depth of the ballast and the underlying rip-rap (crushed Durabond plaster left-over from castings) alongside areas where the landforms sloped away from the track.  Drying times for those areas took several days, but none of it ever lifted like that, and I've never seen cork absorb water...it literally floats like a cork if it's not secured in-place.

I'd like to see your repair be successful, but my guess is that you'll need a redo, as similar work on that nearest track could repeat that episode.

Wayne

[crossthedog]

Mark, this gives me the willies. I'm so sorry you're dealing with this. I haven't even started thinking about ballast yet, but I would never have expected something like this to happen. Yikes! But my prediction is your fix will work. And remember "Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end."

-Matt

[hon30critter]

Hi Mark,

That's a pretty scary picture! I hope the damage is contained to just that one spot.

I can think of a number of possible causes:

- Too much alcohol (which would dissolve the glue and possibly affect the cork),

- Not enough yellow glue,

- Perhaps the glue had partially dried before the cork was laid,

- Defective cork

As an experiment, you could take a piece of cork and spray it with alcohol to see what happens.

Only time will tell if your solution works. I hope it does.

Dave

[Pruitt]

If you've been following my layout build follies, you know I've had a few problems this year with a roundhouse reverting suddenly to kit form, plaster scenery work failures, and other smaller "learning moments" as I've been going.

Another one has popped up today!

The past few months I've spent many hours ballasting Casper Yard. I'm probably over 3/4 of the way done and it's all gone pretty well - until today.

See the following photo. A bit earlier today I ballasted a turnout (the one in the upper left with the screwdriver next to it) that leads to Natrona Lunber to the left and the Standard Oil Company refinery tank car loading racks straight ahead. It's all the same process I used to good effect in the rest of the yard, so I had no reason to expect a problem. The turnout is ballasted, wetted with alcohol and the ballast glued with diluted white glue.

I'm undergoing day surgery tomorrow morning (nothing major wrong), so I'm a bit restless this evening. I wandered back down to the train room, thinking I might do a bit more ballasting, or maybe clean up the room a bit (hard to believe that one, isn't it?), and I'm sure glad I did!

When I walked over to check out how that ballasted turnout was looking, I found this mess:

Holy cow! The yellow glue holding the cork down let loose and the cork wrinkled up underneath the turnout, bowing the turnout upwards in the process! Yikes!!

This has not happened anywhere else in the yard. As you can see, the ballasted turnout is near the edge of the cork right here. While track is caulked to the cork, turnouts are left floating. And this one sure floated!

I looked around for a way to flatten everything out, in the hopes that the cork will dry and not force me to pull the turnout and cut out the wavy cork and replace it all.

This is what I came up with:

I added full strength yellow glue under the edge of the wrinkled cork using a popsicle stick, then laid a 4' machined aluminum level along the track and weighted it with unspent soda cans. That seems to have flattened out things under the turnout. I also used the heavy steel ruler from my 16" combination square, along with the head of the square and a pair of medium/large dikes for weight, to flatten the loose wavy edge of the cork.

This will all stay in place for 24-36 hours to allow everything to dry thoroughly. Then we'll see what we shall see. With a bit of good luck, this will be "disaster averted."

So step right up and place your bets, folks! Whadda ya think? Will I have to rebuild that area, or will my attempt at repair prove successful? 

Personally, I'm thinking it's a toss-up. What about you?