Spring cleaning

 

Pretty much like every year, I did a nice clean-up of the layout, the tracks, and the train room. I cleaned the tracks with the rubber and ran the Roco cleaner afterwards.

You can clearly see the difference: clean on the right and not so clean on the left with cat hair ...

While cleaning the tracks, I have to be careful not damaging the ballast. Unrelated, but it just so happens that some of the ballast didn't hold well to the vacuum. I'm not sure if it wasn't glued properly or if it got damaged through the winter because of temperature differences and UV light  ...

But, at least, trains are running again!!

 

Spring cleaning

 

Following the several ballasting and weathering sessions, the tracks were in need for some cleaning. I used the Mabar cleaning wagon with the vacuum, the pad and the Mabar cleaning liquid for the pad. I only did the 2 main tracks for now. 

It's the first time I used the pad and the liquid. It seems to work somewhat well. And here's what the vacuum collected:

Track cleaning ...

 

All tracks are now clean!! I used two types of cleaning rubbers:

• Peco #PL-41 Rail Cleaner: more abrasive for the tracks I haven't cleaned before

• Walthers #949-521 Bright Boy Abrasive Track Cleaner: more gentle for the outside tracks

They both work well. They get used quite quickly and require a thorough vacuuming afterwards as they leave some residues behind.

Walthers rubber on the left

And it's all well and nice:

Track cleaning - part 3

 

Following the previous post on cleaning tracks, I tried today to run the Mabar cleaning wagon with the "sanding" disk and it seems that it might be just too rough. 

See below for those striations:

Track cleaning - part 2

 

I purchased a cleaning wagon from Mabar a couple of years ago and can finally put it to use.

Mabar 81802-B

The instructions are available here.

Digitization

The manual is clear enough and the process straight forward. The roof is held by two rather powerful magnets. The body can be spread to release it from the chassis. A 21-pin decoder is installed; I took a ESU LokPilot V4.0 ref 54615. I might get a cheaper decoder, because no functions are required. Adjusting the speed control on that decoder makes the motor on the cleaning wagon go faster; the same motor is used for the polishing and for the vacuum.

Running

I made a cleaning consist with the "passive" Roco cleaner. It went around the layout without much trouble.

Track cleaning

I'm facing some challenges with running engines on (dirty) tracks. Back a couple of months ago, I cleaned them thoroughly; the proof is here. I thought, at the time, that I would not need another thorough cleaning for another 6 months. Unfortunately, a few weeks after running the HLE 1312, I wanted to run some other engines and nothing moved. I tried doing another cleaning with the Woodland Scenics Rail Tracker Cleaning Kit:

The manual explains that the different pads can be used for two main purposes: major and minor cleaning. I tried both, but the results were very disappointing.

Today, I'm back on the layout and thought I'd go directly with the Roco Track cleaning rubber (ref 10002). 

This time, it's clearly working and the only downside is the need to vaccum afterwards as it leaves residue on the tracks. You can see below where one side has been cleaned and the other one has not.