The Randall Museum in San Francisco hosts a large HO-scale model model railroad. Created by the Golden Gate Model Railroad Club starting in 1961, the layout was donated to the Museum in 2015. Since then I have started automatizing trains running on the layout. I am also the model railroad maintainer. This blog describes various updates on the Randall project and I maintain a separate blog for all my electronics not directly related to Randall.
2022-01-16 - Randall Repairs: Turnout T111
Category RandallAffected |
Turnout T111 (after Fairfield station, arriving at Lodi). |
Description |
Point loose. Specific steam engines derailing.. |
Summary Fix |
Spike/glue the point. |
Description of Issue
We’ve had some specific steam engines derail here in the past. It was identified the point rails were loose because there is no turnout throw rod at all. Previously the point rails were spiked.
We recently were having problems again with some specific engines, this time being this BLI 844 Challenger. The suspicion was that the spike may have been too high and derailed the engine.
Description of Fix
We removed the spike and installed a new one, making sure it was sitting lower and not against the inner closure rail head. We also use some CA to glue the floating point in place:
However this did not solve the issue for this particular engine. We identified it still derails on the curved turnout, even at low speed.
Fix time: 30 minutes.