Garden Railway Forum

gregh wrote: ↑Wed Jun 06, 2018 5:50 am
I wonder if Rik can read the sign under the station nameboard. (after all our railways are only 13k km apart)
sands.jpg

I flicked down the page as it first loaded and happened to stop with that pic centre screen, so that was actually the first thing that registered and my immediate thought was "That's gonna be a long hike!"

I certainly can read the sign, Greg. I must reciprocate. I'm just carrying out some redevelopment work at Beeston Market (as well as at Peckforton) and so will be an ideal opportunity.

Rik

Brilliant way of doing a connection between our two countries…Love it.

FWLR wrote: ↑Wed Jun 06, 2018 8:02 am Brilliant way of doing a connection between our two countries…Love it.

Sort of like doing "Sister Cities" (or do you call it 'twinning"?
Since the PLR is near the Sandstone Trail and I have a Sandstone station, it was a natural idea to join them.

It is “Twinning” Greg you are correct.

Had a few friends around for a run in the windy weather here.

Keith brought his NSWR CPH railmotor and parcels van. Here it is at Lilyvale
My 'small' diesel based on a BHP D9 (I think)
the railmotor at Sandstone
Unloading is in progress at Sandstone goods shed
My diesel passes Lilyvale St Hebel's church
Geof was here too with his big Queensland Railways diesel but I didn't get any good pics. (sorry Geof)
A fun day until the wind got too much and we had to retreat inside for coffee and chat.
That's what GR is all about!


And a short video

The video may be short but the shots you got are really good, Greg. Looks like you were using a long lens to get some interesting new angles. Great stuff!

Rik

Love your clip going over the bridge Greg...Brilliant.

Geoff, the video is great along with the trains, however (and I have seen it in your other videos) the rocks are just fantastic, I assume they are natural in your garden.

Jimmyb wrote: ↑Fri Aug 21, 2020 11:27 am Geoff, the video is great along with the trains, however (and I have seen it in your other videos) the rocks are just fantastic, I assume they are natural in your garden.

Thanks for the comment and yes the rocks are real and natural.
(BTW I am Greg - Geof is my friend with the blue diesel in the video).

gregh wrote: ↑Sun Aug 23, 2020 6:00 am

Jimmyb wrote: ↑Fri Aug 21, 2020 11:27 am Geoff, the video is great along with the trains, however (and I have seen it in your other videos) the rocks are just fantastic, I assume they are natural in your garden.

Thanks for the comment and yes the rocks are real and natural.
(BTW I am Greg - Geof is my friend with the blue diesel in the video).

Greg, apologies for my confusion, I blame my age

Always a pleasure to see your line in operation, Greg.

I just HATE doing maintenance!!! BUT.....

I make most of my own turnouts from brass rail nailed to treated pine sleepers.
But after nearly 20 years ‘on the ground’ some of them are rotting. The worst ones are in an area where rain water ‘pools’ after heavy rain with nowhere to runoff. I originally ballasted the turnouts and track with concrete and small gravel. So the sleepers were wet a lot of the time. (Other turnouts not on the ground are still as good as new).

I have tended to ignore the problem until finally the ‘main’ sleeper on which the blades pivot rotted out. Then they didn’t work any more!
So it was time to do some maintenance.
Here’s a pic of the first one I removed. I was a case of replacing the sleepers one at a time to keep the geometry ‘more or less’ correct. Takes more time than building them in the first place. My typical track uses 4 nickel-plated steel nails per sleeper (15mm long) bent over the rail foot.
But many of the sleepers on a turnout don’t have room for nails on both sides of the rail, so where this happens, I epoxy the single nail to the rail and sleeper.
(Note that my frogs are made from styrene.)

After finishing all that, I ‘painted’ the undersides of the sleepers with waterproof PVA glue, and laid a bit of thin concrete for it to sit on. I am not going to use any ballast this time, so the water can run between the sleepers!
I also painted the nails to try and slow their rusting.

A second turnout was done similarly. I fixed the poor drainage by making very low culverts under the 2 tracks that form the ‘dams’.
If they last 20 years again, they will outlast my modelling days!

Great job done there Greg. It did look to be one heck of a job, but it really does look great now and like you say, will last a good few decades and more now....

20 years survival of wooden sleepered track is impressive in normal conditions, but being regularly soaked is amazing! I remember you once saying that Sydney gets more rainfall than London, which really surprised me.

Rik

Good job, Greg. From the photo is hard to tell which are the renewed ones if we didn't know.

Interesting that your frogs are styrene, and clearly haven't worn significantly with 20 years use. Quite surprising.

philipy wrote: ↑Sun Aug 30, 2020 9:33 am Interesting that your frogs are styrene, and clearly haven't worn significantly with 20 years use. Quite surprising.

Well there's not really a lot to wear them on our models. I have no heavy steamies with metal wheels, all my wagons have plastic wheels. And the guard/check rails should keep wheels away from the actual frog 'point' anyhow.
A related aspect is that in our models, there is no need for the check rails adjacent to the frog. (dotted yellow lines in pic) I assume in the real word they provide extra strength. In our models they perform no 'check' type function to force the wheels away from the frog.
So in my later turnouts I left them off.
The check rails adjacent to the outside running rails are the important ones.

Nice work Greg, it's not often a bit of retimbering ends up in culvert construction!

You make an interesting point (pardon the pun!) about the rails alongside the crossing vee. In the construction of built up crossings (i.e. those assembled with bolts through the rails suitably held at the right distance apart by spacer blocks) the point and splice rail (forming the vee) were bolted together, the rails leading up to the vee from the front were bent and extended alongside the vee to allow the vee and the rails in front of them to be held in the correct alignment to each other. As far as I'm aware that was the only function of the wings and I'm not aware they performed any 'checking' purpose under normal circumstances. As you quite correctly say, it's the check rails opposite the crossing which are vital for the purposes of keeping the flanges on the right side of the vee. The distance from the back of the this check rail to the gauge face of the crossing nose is arguably the most vital dimension on a turnout of any gauge or scale.

The thing I'd never considered was that these wings were perpetuated in cast monobloc crossings. The casting is only about a quarter the thickness of a rail but it is there nonetheless, forming a flangeway of similar size to a grooved rail used in tramway construction. The existence of a flangeway provides an opportunity for an obstruction to occur, with potentially disasterous repercussions, so why perpetuate it in the cast crossing design? I don't have an answer but I shall be asking questions at work to see if I can find out why this was done.

As previously stated in another thread, there's always something new for those of us who find permanent way fascinating.

Andrew

That is an interesting Reply Andrew. Thanks for the info. Despite sitting in the same room as the track Engineers for a few years I never thought to ask about wing rails either.
I wonder if their continued use in monobloc turnouts is an example of just blindly following past practice without wondering WHY?

gregh wrote: ↑Tue Sep 01, 2020 4:43 am That is an interesting Reply Andrew. Thanks for the info. Despite sitting in the same room as the track Engineers for a few years I never thought to ask about wing rails either.
I wonder if their continued use in monobloc turnouts is an example of just blindly following past practice without wondering WHY?

FWIW....

It's my understanding that both check rails and wing rails have a function in a conventional turnout and it depends on which direction the wheel is passing through the V-crossing.

Check rails are needed only in the facing direction and are there to guide the wheel set so the wheel flange doesn't hit the nose of the V, or go through the wrong flangeway, with the usual spectacular, but undesirable results.

Wing rails perform a more obscure purpose in the trailing direction and are used to guide the wheel so the outer part of the tread is properly supported through the throat of the v-crossing as it passes from the nose of the crossing to the knee of the wing rail.

The attached scans are how the function of the wing rail is explained in the 1947 edition of the VRI (Victorian Railways Institute) 'Permanent Way Correspondence Course' books, which was used for teaching track gang labourers who aspired to become gangers.


Both volumes of the VRI course text can be downloaded as scans from Mark Bau's website for anyone interested, there's a lot of general information in there, although most is VR specific. The full scan links are at the top of the following page.

http://www.victorianrailways.net/infast ... thome.html

Regards,
Graeme