Rail Spikes

So, having arrived at a much better approach to painting rusty surfaces I've now turned my attention to the track, specifically how I'm going to affix the rail to the sleepers. The bridge I'm using as inspiration for my entry to the Dave Brewer challenge, which is still a secret for now, uses a fairly light rail held to the sleepers using metal spikes.

All the track I've hand built before has used copper clad sleepers and I've simply soldered the rail in place. Clearly this won't work for rail held down by spikes. So firstly I'm going to use sleepers made from plywood (hence my experiments at painting wooden sleepers) but more importantly I need a source of spikes that will hold the rail in place. My intention is to use code 40 rail, which is pretty small, and I haven't been able to find anyone who sells spikes for such small rail. What I did find though was a series of articles in NG&IRM Review by John Clutterbuck (which were republished in 2008 as a free download) about making track. While John models in 7mm scale using larger rail, he happens to make his own spikes from..... staples.

The approach I've taken mostly follows John's description but with a few changes to take into account the smaller rail size.

I bought the smallest staples I could find but they are still made from quite a thick metal (about 0.45mm) so having used masking tape to keep them together I filed the edges down a bit to make the corner a lot thinner (I had to use diamond files to really make much impression on the steel). Once I'd filed down both sides I used a set of track cutters to cut off the legs of the staples keeping just a tiny amount of the curve. All the spikes were then separated from each other before soaking for about 5 minutes in nail varnish remover (the stuff I "borrowed" from my wife is acetone free but I'm guessing acetone would also work) to ensure the metal is clean and that the plastic coating applied to staples has come off; you end up being able to see the bits of plastic floating in the solution. The spikes were removed from the nail varnish remover (a magnet makes this nice and easy) and dried before being soaked in Carr's metal black. They turn black almost instantly if they are nice and clean but again I left them for about 5 minutes, before removing and drying them.

I still need to figure out the best way of actually using the spikes to fix rail to sleepers but for a quick test I drilled a small (0.45mm) hole and pushed a spike through the sleeper, added the rail so I could accurately drill a second hole for the second spike. Once both spikes were firmly pushed through I held them in place with a drop of superglue added from below. Once this had dried I cut off the excess spike and filed them flush with the bottom of the sleeper.

For a first attempt at making and using rail spikes I think this has worked well.

Track Painting

While I was more than happy with my first attempt at track building clearly it needed painting as sleepers are never copper coloured and the rail is never that shiny.

The first job though was to fill the gaps I'd had to file in the sleepers and I did this using some perfect plastic putty from Deluxe Materials which was filed smooth once it had set. The rails were then given a good clean before I tried something new; metal black.

When I built Jerusalem I painted the rails but it wasn't exactly a success. I found that the paint wouldn't stick well to the rails and tended to flake off over time. This time I decided to try using a chemical to blacken the rails instead, specifically I'm using Carr's metal black for nickel silver which I picked up from C&L Finescale along with the track. The health warnings on the bottle were almost enough to put me off using it, but I gently applied it to the rail using cotton wool buds. I was amazed just how quickly it works, but you do have to make sure the rail is very clean as I found any bits that weren’t were impervious to the chemical and stayed shiny. Once I was happy with the colouring I then applied some Carr's Electrofix to seal everything. Electrofix has a misleading name in that it doesn't actually conduct electricity, so I then buffed the railtops using a coffee stirrer which removed the electrofix and some of the blackening to give a used look to the rails. The final step was to paint the sleepers which I did using RailMatch sleeper grime.

Amazingly after all that the rails still conduct power nicely and the locomotive still moves, and I think the whole thing looks much more convincing than the ready-to-run track I was using before.

Go Your Own (Permanent) Way

As Paul was kind enough to turn me a set of brass track gauges I no longer have any excuse for not trying to hand build some OO9 gauge track. Paul has already used his gauges to build a working point, but I decided to start with something a little simpler; a 30cm straight piece of track.

Of course, deciding to have a go at making my own track was the easy part, working out which parts I was going to use was a bit harder. The easy part was the sleepers. I'm using 3mm wide strips of copper clad PCB cut to a length of approximately 19.25mm (based on a couple of measurements from some PECO stuff I had kicking around). The rail was a lot harder though. The OO9 gauge track I've bought previously uses code 80 rail. The rails are measured in 1/1000's of an inch, so code 80 is 0.080" high. For a light railway this looks a little on the large side and many people use a lighter rail. For example, Paul used code 55 steel rail to build his point, which is 0.055" high. The problem I had was that I wanted to avoid using steel rail as previous experience shows that it does corrode over time, much more so than modern nickel silver rail. In the end I've compromised and used code 60 nickel silver rail from PECO. This rail (PECO IL-1) is a little odd in that it is designed to be used for either Z gauge (which is really tiny) or as conductor rail in 4mm, but it seems perfect for OO9. C&L Finescale stock both the sleepers and the rail and so an order was placed.

Once the parts turned up the first job was to cut the sleepers. The copper clad PCB turns up in strips the right width (3mm) but 17" in length. Fortunately a razor saw cuts through the PCB easily, the problem is how to cut consistent lengths. I could have just measured the strip and marked it up, but I decided I'd make up a little jig to aid the process. This jig sits nicely in my small mitre box and when pushed up against the blade of the razor saw ensures a consistent sleeper length. Once I'd cut a couple of strips into separate sleepers, I then turned to building the track.

I started by drawing up a template on the computer to aid in positioning the sleepers and rails. This was easy for a straight section, but if want to build more complex track in the future will need a little more thought. The sleepers were then stuck to the template using double sided tape, and then the first rail was soldered in place, using coffee stirrers to hold it down while I applied the soldering iron. Once the first rail was soldered to every sleeper I could move on to the tricky bit of adding the second rail.

It turned out that with the track gauges Paul had made me, and some more coffee stirrers, fitting the second rail was nice and straightforward and before long I had something that actually looked like a piece of track. Even better a quick test with a wagon and it looked like it might actually work too. What I'd forgotten to do though was to file a gap into each sleeper to ensure that the rails weren't electrically joined. Fortunately on the straight track it was fairly easy to get a file in between the rails to remove some of the copper; in the future I'll definitely be doing this before I solder the rails down. Finally I removed the track from the template, soldered a wire to each rail and then had a go with letting an actual locomotive run along the track.

I opted to try it out with the small diesel I built from the Narrow Planet kit, as the motor would be a lot easier to replace if everything went wrong than it would on the Quary Hunslet, but fortunately, as you can see, it all worked perfectly. In it's current form the track isn't going to win any beauty contests but it should clean up nicely and now I know that I can at least build plain track which is useable so I'll call that success.