How hard is Nickel Silver rail?

[carl425]

rrinker

On trick I remember from an old MR, if you are using solid feeder wire, zig-zag it so when you push it up the hole, it grips the sides. This will hold the wire tightly in contact with the underside of the rail so it can be securely soldered without any sort of holes.

The gap between the ties. rail and roadbed is about .08" high and .12" wide.  If you can get a hot iron and solder into that space to attach a wire to the underside of the rail and not melt a tie, you must be some kind of soldering savant.  There is no way I could pull that off.

Why do you object to a hole?

[rrinker]

 It just seems like a whole lot of work when there are other ways. It's probbaly just fine, since a drill that small will snap before it ruins any track if it gets seized up. I'm not sure I could get the wire to line up in the hole even with my magnifier headset but then I am starting to develop vision issues.

 It appears you are drilling in to the slanted bottom web of the rail - while you think it would take almost superhuman power to solder a wire under the rail, with the extended very thin tip in my soldering station it wouldn;t be too much trouble, while I feel almost the same about trying to start a tiny drill on a slanted surface and not have it wander all over the place. I'm fairly steady if a rest my forearms on something, but there reamisn the issue of seeing what I'm doing.

 Pretty much anything short of running an inch of wire along the visible side of the rail is darn near invisible after the rail is painted. ANd model rail joiners ruin any effect anyway, painted or not. Unless you are not using joiners, which IS possible, and adding some joint bars.

 Now there's a product idea - instead of both sides of the rail joiner crimped over, one side could be punched to resemble a prototype joint bar. Just one side, which you place facing out, so there is nothing to interfere with flanges. Or if carefully made, the "joint bar" part of the detail wouldn't stick out past the railhead. These would have to be track brand specific since the dimensions of the web vary from track brand to track brand, even when it's the same overall height. Boom, every track joint has proper detail.

My previous method of powering via the rail joiners also made invisible feeders, although of course they had to be installed when laying the track. I am probbaly not going ot use that method on the next layout since I will have many isolated sections for signaling and detection.

                      --Randy