Hello,

I wanted to share a small success I had. I have four old tin plate thunder boxes, three of which shorted out on the pukos on curved turnouts. So I measured the gauge of the wheels and found that, even though the difference in gauge was very slight, the offending coaches had a smaller gauge. I removed the wheels from the coaches, held each axle by a wheel in each hand and, with a twisting motion a quarter of a turn at a time, adjusted the gauge. After a couple of trials and errors all coaches work flawlessly on all of my four curved turnouts in all directions.

I also learned that a similar type adjustment to decrease the gauge on a Fleishmann 8 axle depressed flat car has cured it from derailing on the same curved turnouts.

So it seems that curved turnouts are more prone to problems with bad gauge, since none of the above wagons had any trouble on straight turnouts.

Hope this helps somebody.

Here is the one of the coaches in question:

Here is a close up of problem area. The picture is on a straight turnout, but the concept is the same. On the curved turnout, the last pukos before the frog are really close to the rails:


Gratuitous picture of layout with 4 curved switches on the right, which will be a future shadow station:

Edited by user 05 April 2010 16:59:59(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified