07-24-2010, 09:30 PM
So I completed re laying the track for the upper loop and will start making my way through the valley to the town over the next week before I take off on vacation. Shouldn't take me too long...
This gives me a full loop to run trains again. Which was exciting! I pulled out the Challenger, my FP9A, and a RS10 and started playing around. Noticed a few things...
First off, control is messed up. I keep loosing the ability to control speed, but I can still trigger sounds and lights. Its very strange. I try doing a soft reset, but it does not change anything. I gotta actually unplug the power to regain control. I've never seen this before. At first I thought it was because I was only using one power lead for a good 20ft of track. So I tried it with only two feet of track and ran into the same issue using only one locomotive. So I'm sure its the system itself.
Second, my turnouts are in bad shape. They always have been, but I really don't wanna deal with the frustration. I keep getting derailments all the #4's I've laid so far (3), so I pulled the turnouts and sat down with a couple of cars, a few straight pieces of track, and my NMRA gauge. I find that on these Kato turnouts the cars are not picking the points, but its actually hitting the fixed rail after the moving part of the point (make sense? I don't know the technical term)
this is interesting because the fixed rails are much thicker than the movable rails. But they are also taller. Filing the rail shorter seems to help the main route, but the diverging route is much trickier because of the difference in thickness of the rail. I tried filing them to be skinnier, but I destroyed the turnout in the process....
so I'm trying to figure out other ways to improve the turnout operation...
turnouts are Kato Unitrack.
This gives me a full loop to run trains again. Which was exciting! I pulled out the Challenger, my FP9A, and a RS10 and started playing around. Noticed a few things...
First off, control is messed up. I keep loosing the ability to control speed, but I can still trigger sounds and lights. Its very strange. I try doing a soft reset, but it does not change anything. I gotta actually unplug the power to regain control. I've never seen this before. At first I thought it was because I was only using one power lead for a good 20ft of track. So I tried it with only two feet of track and ran into the same issue using only one locomotive. So I'm sure its the system itself.
Second, my turnouts are in bad shape. They always have been, but I really don't wanna deal with the frustration. I keep getting derailments all the #4's I've laid so far (3), so I pulled the turnouts and sat down with a couple of cars, a few straight pieces of track, and my NMRA gauge. I find that on these Kato turnouts the cars are not picking the points, but its actually hitting the fixed rail after the moving part of the point (make sense? I don't know the technical term)
this is interesting because the fixed rails are much thicker than the movable rails. But they are also taller. Filing the rail shorter seems to help the main route, but the diverging route is much trickier because of the difference in thickness of the rail. I tried filing them to be skinnier, but I destroyed the turnout in the process....
so I'm trying to figure out other ways to improve the turnout operation...
turnouts are Kato Unitrack.
-------------------------------------
-Luke
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http://www.the-gauge.net/forum/viewtopic...212#p15212 = Traction of the Pacific South Eastern
-Luke
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http://www.the-gauge.net/forum/viewtopic...212#p15212 = Traction of the Pacific South Eastern