Curious if anyone has some creative solutions for guardrails around curves or switches that sometimes derail. I'd like to do something a little better or cooler than a larger lip on the table edge or a plexiglass wall. Thanks in advance for suggestions.
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Look at the Lionel/K-line streets guard rails...they come straight 6-22470 and curved 6-22536 might be what you want. There are two versions of the curved radius.
if you tack them down they may work for you.
Ralph
How about telephone poles made from dowels anchored into the table with a string mid level to stop any wayward derailments. The string on the tops would just be for looks.
This is a prototypical design.
Cantara Loop, northern California
How about telephone poles made from dowels anchored into the table with a string mid level to stop any wayward derailments. The string on the tops would just be for looks.
Excellent idea. Exactly the type of non guardrail - guardrail I was hoping for.
Someone had this idea, I don't recall if it was a post or in a magazine: to use window screen, trimmed to look like fencing. I don't recall the post construction, but I would use something strong. In practice it would work like an interstate guardrail - the direct impact posts might snap or bend, but the fence being attached to multiple posts, would give but not allow the train to go through.
On my layout, I have about 3/4 inch of 1X4 that sticks up above the height of the table. I did have one derailment in the last 3 years coming down a 3% slope that it caught. I had considered running plexiglass or somesuch around the layout, but have not needed it (so far). -Ken
This is a prototypical design.
Cantara Loop, northern California
That definitely looks like it would work in real life! But I'd expect it to be on the outside of the curve. What am I missing here?
Stringlining perhaps - cars pulled across the inside of a curve.
I get it now... http://www.redding.com/news/20...egacy-of-a-disaster/
This is a prototypical design.
Cantara Loop, northern California
They had to do SOMETHING with that super sharp curve & bridge arrangement, after they dumped a fully loaded tank car of some sort of "bug killing chemical" into the Sacramento River. That Cantara Loop, just out of Dunsmuir, CA, on the 2.2% ascending grade out of the Sacramento River Canyon and up to Black Butte, is the sharpest curve on the entire Southern Pacific system. After Mr. Phil Anschutes purchased the SP and had all his Rio Grande managers come over to "show the SP people how to mountain railroad", it didn't take long for the directive to come out of San Francisco forcing them to run longer/heavier trains eastbound out of Dunsmuir. It didn't take 30 days, and they string-lined a huge train, and dumped some 20,000 gallons of chemical into the river.
Lionel/K-Line Streets Guard Rails are they flexible or rigid? Can I bend the rail around a turn?
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