Bad advice

 When I built AIR1 I took some bad advice. Quite a bit in fact. Most of it turned out to be VERY costly. Today’s “Rant” is about gluing track, which I was promised would be the very best way to build my layout. This turned out to be the single most costly piece of advice I took when building AIR1, and now after some research I have found it wasn’t only bad for me. 

I was strongly advised to glue my track down with DAP Brand adhesive caulk. Gluing track down allows you to get a lot of track down FAST. 

If you use push pins and a straight edge, your tangents can be made VERY straight. In yards I cut a spacer that I used between tracks. First I laid the first track using the straight edge, then slipped the spacer block in and butted the next track up to that. Yards went down fast and straight. I was, and to be honest am still very happy with the results of my track laying. Laying track using DAP Brand adhesive caulk is very forgiving during the actual installation process. You can move track around a bit, you know wiggle components into place. Then pin it down. The track, once glued, almost never kinked (We did in fact have some annual heat kinks that I eventually ironed out), or moved. It looked good. Was EASY.  You did not need to nail track, which often will pull track down, when the track nail is over driven, causing vertical curves that cause no end of problems. 

Gluing track down onto sanded, correctly prepped subroadbed, and using push pins to hold it until the glue set, looked like an unbelievable success.

Then I encountered problems. CHANGES. Gluing track was a system created by modelers who PLAN. 

We all plan, but these guys P-L-A-N. It’s all down on paper, which is then transferred to benchwork, and there is simply no allowance for changes. Why would you? You have researched, and PLANNED, studied track charts, and you know where each pile of ties was along side the ROW on May 28, 1938.

Let’s just say that that level of planning does not enter my world. Get it in. Do it now. “There isn’t time to do it right, we’ll fix it later, it shoots Tuesday!”*.

That’s my world. I do regret my poor planning skills. I am confident that I actually DO KNOW the fastest and cheapest way to accomplish a task WITHIN my purview. Most often, however, what I regret is that I’m given a task, I make a plan, I start to execute my plan, and then the “Task Giver” comes up with a different plan, that now must supersede my plan, which now makes it look like I didn’t plan… but I digress…

Modelers who make changes pay a huge price when track is glued. I was told that using DAP Adhesive caulk would be forgiving. That was a LIE. I was shown that DAP Adhesive caulk would pry up with a putty knife in several model railroad videos and magazine articles. Those were fraudulent (I’m not joking). Some people have agendas even in Model Railroading. 

For home construction projects I actually recommend DAP brand adhesive caulk, it holds like a MOTHERF- - - - - -! I have used quite a bit of it building my new house.

Against my gut reaction to gluing track down, I bought cases of the stuff (I needed to special order it because it was not available on the west coast, which should have been a warning sign) and I happily started to glue track; roughly 1800’ of it.

If a change needed to be made I soon found out, and TO MY HORROR, prying up track was nearly impossible. The vast majority of track I tried to pry up was destroyed. Losing flex track was bad, destroying turnouts was unbearable. Let’s just say I lost a LOT of track and turnouts. I eventually developed a very labor intensive and extremely messy process to salvage SOME of the track, which I only used on turnouts.

After extensive reviews of several articles about gluing track, and seeing several tests of different glues, I have learned that A LOT of other modelers had problems with track they glued. I was initially assured that I installed it WRONG, which I did not wholly buy. Quite a number of modelers WANT to glue track, but also want to be able to salvage it after a change is made.

So next time I’ll plan better, and I THINK I have a better idea of what advice to take and what to ignore.

So after seeing what other modelers are doing, with success in both laying track, and making changes, I have also determined that, after running some tests of my own, I will again glue down my track. But I will use DAP Brand Alex Latex caulk, not adhesive.

*Movie and Television talk for “Hurry the F— up!”