The mother of all track cleaners

That should work great. The only suggestion might be to replace those plastic side frame trucks with a pair of all-metal postwar trucks. With that amount of weight, the axle ends will probably chew up the "bearing" holes quickly. At least, keep the wheel/axle contact area well lubed so that the axle ends themselves rotate as little as possible.

Jim

I have a question on this design. Is the bar that will hold the 'scrubbing medium of choice' free to float up and down, or is it fixed in place?

If it is free to float, then I believe that the heavy weights in the chassis will not have much, if any, effect upon the scrubbing ability, but will greatly increase the load on whatever is used to pull this car.

You just need to triple-head some Big-Boys to pull that load!

I built one similar to this but without all the extra weight. I used old pieces of chamois as the cleaning media. Works good.

I guess, the idea being is that all you need is an old rolling stock car and figure out a way to most efficiently design a track cleaning car!  As I get more involved in this hobby I am more compelled then ever to do this!!!

Unless these are different than standard plastic truck wheels, the wheels are fixed to the axle and the axle does all the rotating.

That's really too much weight for a track cleaner car IMO. You risk damaging switch points etc and those Postwar trucks aren't made to handle that much weight. If your tracks are seriously dirty/rusty it's best to clean them by hand first, then do periodic track cleaning with a more modestly weighted car. 

John,

 The 6044 Airex boxcar is a postwar car. As with all postwar trucks, the wheels move independently of each other on the axle - no fast-angle, fixed wheelsets in that era.

Jim

Fun to see, but my impression was the same as Ace's. Seems a little like using a 12-pound sledge hammer to drive a two-penny nail. And as he noted, there's the risk of damaging something.

Sometimes less is more.

I wasn't sure what plastic trucks we were talking about.  Obviously, those you could just not lube the axle and hope the wheels turn. 

OTOH, the reservations about the weight seem pretty valid, I'm not sure I'd want that much weight pressing down on the track.  Any snag of the cleaning material and you could indeed pull something apart.  Hope he doesn't have Atlas switches!