track cleaning

I thought I would share some tracking clean thoughts I have had the last few weeks. I have not moved my trains from the States yet to Canada, the layout is housed at my GFs house in Michigan after I left Iowa because of my divorce. Long story but anyways she house the L shaped switch yard, ( one sheet of 4x8 foot ply wood cut into 2x8 and put in a l shape ) holds about 50 cars and has turn table and with tracks to hold 6 locomotives.

So anyways i packed up all the cars and put them in palstic totes for long terms storage. Put the locomotives on the self over the layout and covered the front with plastics to keep the dust off them.
The tracks are combination of brass and N/S. I put everything away in December before I left to come home , I went back in April for 2 weeks, put various locomotives on the tracks and they ran very well without anyout any track cleaning or wheel cleaning. I was shocked. I figured I would spend hours cleaning track and wheels and not have any time to run anything. well i was wrong. my katos, atlas, spetrums, and p2k all ran fine like they had been running beofre they got stored for 4 months. so maybe I was lucky not to have to clean track or the train gods liked me this week.
so how often do you clean tracks and wheels? not even black marks on my fingers when i touched the brass track i was amazed by it all.

anyways that is my track cleaning story clean it once a year and forget about it

 

steamhead

Active Member
Hi,
You are lucky, but once you get your trains up and running you'll find that it's not just oxide that makes track less "conductive", there are all sorts of particles, from soot to dander, dust, etc., that are floating around and eventually settle on your track. So keeping track clean needs to be an on-going operation. I have developed a device for doing just that-it's posted on ebay at this time. Search for HO TRACK GUARD-check out the description and the comments from buyers. You'll be glad you did!
Gus.
 

rcline

Member
Steamhead, I went and looked at your track cleaner. Just what chemical is it that is on your specially treated track cleaner? I do a lot of work with plastics and my brother and I own a little plastics manufacturing company, volkstech.com/index.html , and I know of a lot of chemicals that will hurt plastics,
some do damage right off the bat and some take quite a long time. That is why I
would like to know about your specially treated cleaner.
--Please reply--
Thankyou for your time and concern in this matter!
Randy Cline
 

steamhead

Active Member
Hi Randy,
While I'm not at liberty to divulge the treament, rest assured that being a user of this item in my own RR, I checked every angle that may affect train operations-including effects on plastics, since many folks out there use plastic-wheeled trucks (including some myself). I can assure you that there is no adverse effect on any item of the RR -it just keeps your track clean!!
Gus
 
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