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Train Guy's Large Scale Page

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    Photo 1 (left): Standing with cat to admire train. Madonna does not walk the trestle. So far only squirrels walk the trestle. Deer leap the trestle. Racoons climb over the trestle. Humans push, tug, and thump the trestle. Trestle is rock solid.            

    Photo 2 (middle):  A close up of LGB Forney coasting downgrade 1%. Phoenix Sound demonstrates nicely the effect of grade on exhaust rate.

    Photo 3: Club member Greg admiring his AristoCraft SanteFe. Greg has a nice yard layout that has far more buildings. His has been operating for at least seven years.

    Starting with a LGB Starter Set in 1974 I operated the starter set with three switches and a few cars until I found other large scale train nuts after relocating to Eugene, Oregon. Starting in late June of 2000 I began with the trestle. This trestle is 70' long (scale 1700 feet) and 8' tall (scale 200 feet high). The trestle was finished enough to run on by October 5, 2000. The remaining oval of 80' on 1/4" minus crushed granite roadbed took only a few days to make. Despite my fears of dropping an engine off the trestle, not one engine has fallen though many operate at full speed.

    I installed AristoCraft Stainless Steel rail (comes in 8 foot lengths) into LGB or AristoCraft tie strips. LGB ties accept rail easier than AristoCraft. AristoCraft ties hold the rail tighter. To make the ties look more like the crooked ties on most railways I cut the plastic tie spacers alternately on left and right ends and left the spacer in place randomly. When ties were strung onto rails and pushed close together, some ties were forced to angle. Connections of rail were made using stainless steel rail clamps. Bending the stainless steel rail was a fiddly business using a homemade bender. I found that the rail would sometimes bend more acutely than other times with the bender set the same! I wonder if the rail was coiled at some point prior to final straight form? The rail head sometimes leaned due to less than perfect rail bending, this changed track guage and had to be corrected by rebending rail or sometimes rebending and adding additional screws to firmly true up the rail head and guage.

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