A Garden Railway Track Cleaner
Ray Tranter
Pictures by the author
An idea I had for cleaning my outdoor ground level track has worked very well, so I thought it may be of interest to other members. I never wanted to have the tracks raised; they had to be on ground level to give me the realism of normal railways. I had always bent down and rubbed the track with a metal cleaning block, and I have a double track which runs around the lawn. It used to take about ten minutes to clean the tracks, and I was glad to stand up and straighten my legs afterwards.
So my idea was to have the cleaning block fixed to a pole of some sort. I thought of a sponge mop and bought one at the market. I pulled the sponge off it, taped two cleaning blocks together (but not on the side which cleans the tracks) and screwed them centrally to the plastic sponge holder. I needed to cut off both ends of the holder to match the ends of the blocks, or else they would be too long to pass by the station. Now I can stand and push the two cleaning blocks along both tracks as though I’m cleaning the floor!
Another idea I had for the track, was to lay it on concrete instead of on wood. I had laid my first track on wood and a few years later it rotted just as I thought it would. This time I bought concrete pavement edging slabs and laid them flat. They were wide enough to take two tracks. I thought that I would drill the holes in the slabs and screw down the track, but the drills kept breaking so I tried gently tapping panel pins or tacks through the Peco track and straight into the slabs, being careful not to bend the tacks. Amazingly, it worked, and the tracks are very firm and don’t rise when there is a frost.
