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Arching is a product of poor conductivity between the rail and the wheels. Electricity follows the path of least resistance (just like water). That is the primary disadvantage of steel rail in HO. The advantage to it is better adhesion. In the past, people combined steel rail with oil to...

Yes. Christ Hospital (our second choice was Good Sam which is a stone's throw from our house...if he was high risk, he'd have been born there instead!). In that case, his birthday (today) comes with a nice pedigree for narrow gauge modeling! Happy Birthday! Thank you all for the...

...has arrived. I've started him off right with my favorite railroad picture: William Henry Jackson's 1884 masterpiece of the newly completed Georgetown Loop. In the foreground is the DSP&P Office Car...a close relative to my pay car...and seemingly a frequent visitor to the Colorado Central...

There definitely are trends. I wonder how much is driven by a cool new product, how much is from the model magazines, and how much is from an individual modeler (Furlow for example) For me, I am a foamer first and a modeler second. I'm far more interest in seeing the real thing than an...

I don't use pliers...I use my teeth :mrgreen: Actually, i use a funky tool, I don't recall who makes it, it's probably somewhere between 30 and 45 years old. It holds a spike while I start it, and then I remove it from the spike, put it on top, and drive it in. I usually drive my spikes in at...

Ouch! That's what's kept me away from Fast tracks fine products...capital investment. Maybe on the big layout someday, but for my modest 3 turnouts...files have worked well enough. With knowledge of the tie strips you're referring too (I should have looked it up), it sounds just fine. Your...

No consensus so far...mix between cork is a nuisance and just fine. My opinions: for flex track: Foam best cork ok plywood bad for hand laying: cork best foam sub par plywood terrible I prefer both to be on extruded foam and then either spline or plywood.

They seem fine. You'll probably want to remember remove the plastic tie plates/spikes where they would interfere with the points. Another point is that the ties aren't long enough to look right (if it is just flex track style strips). I'd suggest sliding the rail in, glueing/soldering it to...

It is an optical illusion, but good work catching it! HO track is in gauge...it just has some out of scale tolerances. On the other hand, British OO vs. EM & P4...or our 1:48 O scale & O-27 vs. Proto:48, does have gauge issues. Our O-scale, both 2 and 3 rail, is 5' gauge. The optical...

The spikes aren't held by the cork, they're held by the ties you've glued to the cork. The problem with foam is that it compresses too much while spiking...you end up having less control. That's the only advantage I feel that cork has over foam. Further, when the foam compresses, it can...

No, no, no, Mountain Man. They'll get you on the Sedition Act of 1798. Those darn Federalists! Tory scum. If that doesn't work, they'll bring back the fairness doctrine and force equal time for every view point...in the spirit of the Senate's Filibuster without 60 votes. ;-)

I would love to switch to P87. It looks wonderful and, to me, would be completely worth it. The only problem is that I'm a steam only guy (with an exception for honorary steam engines, NKP PA-1s). While all your diesels would merely need a wheelset swap, I would need to either find a source...