Wheel Chocks?

[jonathan]

Not sure of the proper nomenclature.  I am installing a turntable.  I don't have much space to work with.  I am using the Atlas turntable (nice and small and easy to install).  


I can tell already I won't have room for adding bumpers.  I was wondering if anyone has ever made some kind of small device that solders or glues to the end of the rail, as a wheel stop.  I can't let my engines go for a ride to the garage floor, if my fingers slip.


Anyway, the wheel chock thing is my concern.


Here's a little homemade control box I made.  So far I can switch on/off 4 tracks.  Plan to power one more track and have a switch, or button, for the turntable motor, if/when I decide to intall one (read, if I find one cheap enough  ).


Regards,

Jonathan

[full maxx]

I must say your quite the engineer for this railroad thing but boy its tight there

[J3a-614]

What you want are called wheel stops.  Like their prototypes, these are available commercially:

http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/81-803

http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/135-2005

http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/247-171

http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/675-677

The prototype roads also often just used a pile of dirt, or a pair of crossties interlocked through the regular ties, with one end of each buried and betwen the regular ties.  Since you use regular DC, you could also gap your turntable tracks in one rail at an appropriate clearance point, and install a diode (one-way check valve); once the locomotive is completely past the gap, it stops automatically; the diode still lets you run the engine back out again.  Hope this helps, and I like your control panel, too.

[full maxx]

The diode sounds like a great idea

[Doneldon]

Jonathon-

There are a couple of commercial wheel stops in the Walther's catalog.  I purchased some a while back but I don't recall the brand or price.  You can also free-lance something like a bumper from some timbers or a pile of dirt or stone.  These could be off of the end of your roundhose tracks, thus not limiting the space on those tracks.

1:1 railroads use wheel stops (and derailers) quite a bit, either at the ends of sidings or to keep cars from rolling out of one track onto another.  These are quite small and I think you could fashion something out of materials in your scrap box.  Almost anything which will work has a prototype someplace, you can be sure.  My only suggestion would be to make sure they all look the same.  Or I suppose they could all be different and you could post a small sign explaining that the railroad is testing various types of wheel stops.

          --D

[Jim Banner]

Were you thinking of something like these?



The are simple to make out of 1/2" x 3/4" pieces of 1/16" sheet brass.  Just drill a 3/8" hole dead center and then cut in half both ways.  A few strokes with a file to round the backs and knock off the sharp tip and you have 4 wheel stops.  They are a little bit too thick, a bit too wide, and the tip should be sharper.  It was a compromise between a true scale stop and an instrument of doom, capable of giving you a nasty puncture wound if you happened to lean a hand on one.

I soldered mine to the rails and have never had one let go, not even when someone runs a long train at speed into one.  Nor have I ever had anything, including light weight cabooses, jump over one.  The secret here is that the radius of the stopper matches the radius of the wheels.  With some locomotives, the stoppers catch the pilot, but that works just as well.

Jim

[jonathan]

Thanks for the help.  Half the battle was learning that they are called wheel stops.

Jim, you read my mind.  I was hoping there was something I could fashion myself.  I don't know if I have any brass scraps left from my engine building phase (think I finally got over that illness).  But there should be some kind of metal stuff around here.  I like the simplicity of your wheel stops.  Just a couple of common tools needed.

I also like the diode trick.  Next time I find myself at Radio Shack,  I may have to pick up a small bag of diodes and start experimenting.

Regards,

Jonathan

[jward]

i don't think the diode trick will work for dcc, as the dcc signal is actually partly ac. the diode will simply eliminate half of the ac waveform.

[jbsmith]

some matchsticks or toothpicks and some glue and you could build something like J3a mentioned.
combine it with some genuine dirt and imagination and you got a earthen stop.

[Jim Banner]

I am not sure if the diodes could be used with DCC or not.  They might work if the decoder implemented "stop on dc" which some do.

My personal solution when I switched from dc to DCC was to take out a passel of toggle switches and run the turntable, the roundhouse tracks, and the outdoor storage tracks all off one push button.  For me, it is a positive way of preventing a locomotive from trying to push the back wall out of the roundhouse while it slowly grinds away the rails.

There is a bit of a difference in mind set between running dc and DCC.  With dc, you frequently turn off track power to keep a locomotive from running so shutting down power on tracks around the turntable is a natural action.  But with DCC, you get used to locomotives being able to stop any old place and so turning off tracks around the turntable is no longer a natural action.  If you forget too often, the day comes when a locomotive starts to creep, unnoticed.  Using a push button to apply power is easy to remember - no pressing the button equals no locomotion, a concept you are automatically reminded of if you ever forget.

Jim

[Aaron]

 what about using nails tracked to the track bed and super glue a bar, rod, tube to the top of the nails

[J3a-614]

Did a little more checking, and found some material on prototype wheel stops.

http://www.harmersteel.com/catalog/track-tools-accessories/wheel-stops/

http://www.bhamrail.com/cranestops.asp

http://www.bhamrail.com/images/wheelbumper.jpg

http://www.railsco.com/~wheel_stops.htm

http://www.allenrailroad.com/RailQuick/Car_Stops.htm

This one is more technical than the others, and is the prototype for the Hayes stops listed in the Walthers catalogue:

http://www.wch.com/pdf/catalog/whlstps.pdf

Going down through prototype listings like this reminds me of looking at a Thomas Catalogue; it's a huge, 11 or 12 volume business directory of just about anything made in North America, from hospital needles to locomotives to jet engines to food processing equipment and even, into the 1970s, steam locomotives.

Who was building steam locomotives in America in the 1970s?  Crown Metal Products and Sandley Light Railway Equipment Company.  These were engines and cars for amusement park service.  Most were quite small, 15 inch or 24 inch gauge, but Sandley offered 2-foot gauge equipment along the the lines of the smaller New England locomotives and cars that would have been right at home behind a Forney, while Crown also offered a 3-foot gauge 4-4-0 that was designed by a former employee of the H. K. Porter company (industrial locomotive company, Bachmann offers some models in On30); this engine weighed 25 tons and was rated for 5,000 pounds tractive effort.  There are photographs of at least one of these three-footers being given running tests on the East Broad Top, and at least one other was built or rebuilt as a standard gauge engine!


http://www.trainweb.org/parktrains/history/crown/index.html

http://www.trainweb.org/parktrains/history/crown/bigcrown.html

http://www.trainweb.org/parktrains/gallery/dgcrown.jpg

http://www.trainweb.org/parktrains/gallery/wb4-4-0.jpg

http://www.infinitevillage.com/html/crown/index.html

Enjoy!