01-15-2011, 09:50 AM
Jim From MT Wrote:Temperature changes can play havoc with trackwork. I was a member of a club (now disbanded) that had the use of a large building at a local museum. Montana has some extremes of temperature and the results showed up every spring when we opened the layout for public display and operation. Track would be bowed by high summer temps and pulled apart by cold in the winter. Don't give up on the layout. I understand that blank doors make good tables for N scale layouts and they should be easy to move from place to place. Jim K
It doesn't even take extreme temperatures. We have a member in the modular club who used to preach that the joiner tracks between modules should should have all of the rails touching when we set up. He was in charge of set up art a local shopping mall one weekend. The mall was indoors and climate controlled, but it had skylights in the roof of the walkways to allow for natural lighting. We set up on a Friday night and he proceeded to "show" us how the joiner tracks should be installed. When we test ran the layout that night it ran better than any set up we had ever done previously. I got there at 7:00 the next morning to get trains running and play with trains before the mall opened and the rest of the guys showed up. Before we had dcc, we were limited on how many trains could run at a time, so when a lot of guys were there, time running trains for individuals was limited to allow everyone and opportunity to run.
As the sun started shining through the skylights and warming the West side of the layout, the tracks started to "kink" from heat expansion, and we had to remove the joiner tracks and cut them shorter to relieve the pressure. As the day wore on, the heat "focus" on the layout
moved and we replaced joiner tracks in the North and South ends. By the end of the day we were replacing the ones on the East side of the layout! Eventually we had the entire layout redone with enough air gap between the modules and the joiner tracks to allow for expansion and the layout had no more problems that weekend. It was not a really big temperature change, just a bit of solar gain that caused the problems. Having the space of a business card between the rails and the joiner tracks was enough to keep everything under control, but being able to slip a business card at all of the joints was essential.