Life during a KAMRI open house can be full of surprises. Something as simple as running trains can go a bit haywire to say the least.

Question 1: What is the effect of a long cold winter period of very low humidity on wood?
Answer 1: It shrinks!

Question 2: What is the effect of a good heating system on metal?
Answer 2: It swells!

Therefore the tie breaking question: What is the effect on a KAMRI open house?
And the answer is: Derailments, uncouplings, and picked switches!

How may you ask does this happen? Well the wood module shrinks and the tracks swell. This builds up just like two tectonic plates trying to slide by each other. Therefore something just has to give. Well it did. We found no fewer than a dozen locations where the track had warped or pulled away from the roadbed. There where around 6 locations where the 5 inch connector tracks between modules had started busting the tracks or had deformed dramatically. It looks like we will be doing a bunch of track repairs in the upcoming weeks big time.

Here's a pair of photos taken of a couple of the trouble spots to feed your curiosity.

Attached Images

  

__________________
Bruce (McToots) McElhoe
KAMRI President
and Web Site Moderator

same thing happend in my N scale. but not in my HO yet. good luck fixing it.

-jake

You may need steel benchwork! I'll send you photos of mine if you are interested.

Bob Nicklow

Alas! These shots are of club modules that have been in service for well over ten years in many different environments. This is the first time for this amount of shrink wrath. I have toyed with using steel construction for new modules with foam decking. Or at least using plywood 1x4 strips for the framing versus standard lumber. At this time we will be exploring putting in additional expansion gaps in the track as part of the track repair. Also, I think abandoning the good old Atlas 5" section tracks that connect the modules should be replaced with flextrack pieces. I witnessed places where the Atlas track was busting the module tracks whereas in places where we used flex track, these pieces just bowed as seen in the above photo without damaging the module tracks.

Food for thought! The n-scalers way.

__________________
Bruce (McToots) McElhoe
KAMRI President
and Web Site Moderator