Derail Problem Solved!

Good catch and remedy.

When I was learning to make my own turnouts . I was talking to a guy that had made hundreds of them in HO. He said more than half the time that a problem on one side of a switch will show itself on the other side of the switch. Which is exactly what happened to you.
It's a given the 3 rail trackage has a heck of a lot of slop but those guard rails do serve a purpose .
A word of caution don't reduce the width between the stock rail and the guard rail to less than 1/4 inch or you may have your wheel climbing up on the stock rail.

I use a spare wheel set and lightly push it thru the switch . It lets me see and feel exactly whats going on.

David

Nice catch and fix.  I love it when something like this has a solution without spending a ton of money.

Thank's for the info. This is the kind of thing that could come in handy for all of us.

Thank You Bobby Ogage !

What is missing in our hobby are published standards.  For real trains we all know that the track gauge is 4' 8 1/2".  But there is more important information used to keep things on the track.  In a wheel shop eveything is focused on the back to back dimension.  This is the distance between the inside of the wheels.  That dimension is typically 53 3/16".  This is the dimension that interfaces with guard rails and gets the cars thorugh the turnouts without derailing. The clearance between the running rail and guard rail should be 1 7/8".  So the gauge between the working face of the gurad rail and the point of the frog would be 4' 6 5/8".

In this case the gurad rail was shimmed to keep the flange from climbing the point of the frog.  But was this really the problem?  The problem could just as easly been that the pilot truck wheel set was not the proper gauge.

I sure hope the manufactures of this equipment have standards and they are all using the same standards.  I wish they would share the standards with us.

O scale 3 rail is the only one that doesn't use a strict set of standards .I guess thats a left over form their pre war roots . In the other scales if you put a NMRA track gauge on the wheel sets, the track or the switches they are going to be the same doesn't matter who made it,it will be the same. In 3 rail you have 5 or 6 making track and all of them will run the trains but all are slightly off from one another. Why?
Same reason we have 2 command systems and they're so far into it there's no turning back.

David

The reason for this post is to compliment you on you excellent pictures of the problem and how to fix it. I doubt I'll ever be good enough with a computer to do anything like that.

Thank you all for the compliments.

Bobby,

Good detective work, great solution, and excellent diagrams to clearly illustrate all of it.

Thank you!

Alex