Saturday, January 16, 2010

Addendum to Atlas Switch Prep Procedure

Last spring I wrote a post on how I prepare Atlas code 80 #6 switches for use in staging. As I was finishing up the middle tier I ran out of the switches I'd bought back in 2006 and started using the switches I bought late last year.

I am happy to report that Atlas has improved the switches since 2006. The frog is a lot cleaner and the area where the point rails meet the closing rails (the red circle in that post) seems to have been re-engineered to be almost perfect out-of-the-box. I found that switch prep was a lot smoother as filing was not needed for those areas.

The other huge plus is that the straight switch rail is now nearly straight, instead of being slightly curved away from the diverging route.

Unfortunately I also found that the outside point rail doesn't seem to close as nicely against the outside rail (the green circle in the previous post). Previously I rarely saw a problem with these, but now I may need to file these down in most cases.

Still, the net is quite an improvement.

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