Reply To: I’ve bit the bullet, Jan. 15, 2011

[David Boeschen]

Quite some time ago, I built a set of three modules which represent the area in Wichita where the MoPac crosses the Santa Fe and the Wreck Island and the WTA trackage crosses and interchanges with everybody. Most of the WTA trackage is storage or spurs to elevators and mills, so it’s secondary trackage and lower than the mainline trackage, and usually smaller rail. So I modeled all of it using 1/8″ Homabed, with slopes down from the main tracks. This 1/8″ Homabed was glued onto 1/4″ plywood strips just like the mainline trackage was. CVT branchline tie strip went on top of that, and I was going to use some code 70 and some code 55 rail, depending on location.

Elsewhere, at Tolerville (modules 13-14), I had four storage tracks, two on each side of the mainline. There I used 1/4″ Homabed laid directly on the subroadbed, so even though I used code 55 there I was able to spike with no trouble. I had to, since I’ve never been able to use the Barge cement method and have the rail stay down. So I assumed I’d have no trouble in north Wichita, despite the difference in roadbed.

Wrong.

All that trackage, easily forty actual feet of track, proved to be impervious to spikes. Everywhere the 1/8″ Homabed was laid, the spikes would bottom out on the plywood and would not be pushed home. They stuck up far enough, I couldn’t even bright-boy the track without hitting the tops of those spikes. I thought about chiseling out all that plywood, and decided there would be way too much damage and way too much mess for that, to say nothing of all the lost work. I tried drilling the spike holes some distance down into the plywood, using the #74 bit I use to drill the plastic ties. That didn’t work, the plywood wasn’t even going to yield to the points of the ME spikes.

Then it occurred to me, the spikes aren’t all that hard. They’re probably annealed steel wire, if I were to guess. After consuming probably 30,000 spikes in my modeling lifetime, I figured I know how they behave (I’ve bent enough of them…..). So I grabbed my trusty rail cutter, which is hardened steel, and did a diagonal cut across a spike, basically cutting it in half. It went in, and bottomed out, and held well enough. So that’s what I’m doing, spiking all that track with modified spikes. At least, they’re going in to every sixth or eighth tie as opposed to every fourth tie on the mainline. The rail cutter isn’t that much the worse for wear, considering it’s probably twenty years old. So, everybody’s happy, and I’m not telling the tool guys about cutting steel spikes with my rail cutter.

RG7