Lee Willis makes his own vehicles for his Automotionfx roads. I bought a few from Automotionfx directly.
@Brad Trout posted:Today I bought my SuperStreets at Nicholas Smith Toys. They have the old SuperStreets on sale and I was able to put together my loop with D-16 curves. They also had a kit to convert a loop to a figure 8 so I went ahead and bought that to add more interest to the layout. They only had Bachmann Straight to Curve pieces which I bought, color difference and all. They also only had Bachmann vehicles and I bought at taxi.
It runs OK, much like an old time conventional locomotive. The main problem I'm experienceing is that it frequently "derails" when crossing the intersection (or crossover).
Anyone have any experience with this? Any known fixes?
Thanks in advance,
Brad
I don't have any experience with the crossover, but I do have experience with the "Y" used in the dog bone and the EZ street taxi. I had frequent derailments when the taxi entered the "Y". The taxi front wheel was hitting the "points". Bad design in my option. I fashioned a shim out of spare Super Streets rail and glued it to the track providing a gradual lead-in to the "Y" points. This fixed the problem. I believe the taxi has a shorter wheel base than other EZ Street vehicles. The short wheel base aggravates the situation.
Faller All Scale Faller Car System
that's the name of the HO system; YOU-TUBE has many videos on the HO installations.
Thank you, shorling. I will give this a try when I get a moment. I agree that it appears the corners (points?) are what kick the taxi off. I found with a little more experimentation that there seems to be an "exact proper speed" where it is much more reliable, although not 100%. But, I really don't want to have to be that precise every time. It's just one little add to my overall locomotive based layout and I don't want to have to fuss with this little taxi when people are over watching trains run.
The Super Street "Y" is more like a switch. The points are the part of the switch that move to route the train one way or the other. In my situation, the points do not genteelly blend with the rails and the taxi wheel hits the leading point edge and derails. Speed was an issue for me too, but it didn't make the problem go away. Visually, after many "practice" derailments I was able to identify the issue and evolve a solution. I used super glue to attach the shim.
The taxi wheel base plays a role here too. The longer the wheel base the more parallel the vehicle is to the rails. With a short wheel base the vehicle can be slightly cocked in the rails especially as it enters the "Y" or maybe in your case the crossing. The slight cocking directed the vehicle hard against one rail when entering the "Y" and the wheel flange would collide with the leading edge of the point.
Also you might try weights. I taped them to the taxi roof as an experiment.. Didn’t work for me but you never know. You might also try a longer wheel base vehicle like a trolley just to see what happens.
