The Kansas Grain Belt (a.k.a. The Great Plywood Glacier) is about 25 years old. (I've been in S for a little over 30 years.)
It's basically a more or less 12'x18' doughnut with a liftout section. When I built it, the liftout in my tiny little mind was brilliant: A stout section with alignment dowels on both ends. I laid the track across and cut the rails to match the angle of the ends. It worked pretty well for the most part, even with the single track end on a curve.
It's a scale railroad, so I can't rely on deep flanges to compensate for poor trackwork. Over all, in spite of myself, I have few derailments.
A year or two ago, the single track end started to give me trouble with derailments. Needless to say, this made operation less enjoyable, so I added a guard rail to compensate:
It helped, but there were still some occasional derailments. The angle cut on the rails were a contributing factor with the derailments
After thinking about it for the past year, I decided to replace this wonderful idea with a section of track that extended beyond the end of the liftout section. But I needed something to hold the curve when the section is lifted out. A piece cut from an evergreen sheet is my solution:
The roadbed was sanded down to compensate for the Styrene sheet. Every tie on the new track on the liftout section is spiked down with 4 spikes to hold it in position. On the piece that sticks out, I glued each tie with Mike's Model and Crafter's super glue (which is supposed to stick to the Delrin of the ties.) to hold the curve. Sliding rail joiners on the bench side will ensure everything lines up. This will all be hidden by ballast... eventually.
I'm going to let it set 24 hours before removing the liftout section to make sure everything stays put. A quick test run of one of my "problem" freight cars show no issues so far.
The other end hasn't been a problem because the tracks are straight (sorta) and the angle cut wasn't as severe, but I expect I'll have to do something similar one of these days.
The one real lesson here is: Next time, no liftout sections.
Rusty
