Super elevation!

The NMRA Civil Engineering  certificate requires various trackwork components, and one of the options is super elevation. While it doesn't specify how much track is required, I wanted to give this a solid effort. Ideally, super elevation is used on broad and sweeping curves. While it looks great, I cant do that on my layout (see what I did there?) because I mostly have industrial sidings and spurs. In fact, in those instances it could easily be confused for sinking foundation, cross-elevation issues, and poor drainage! So, it had to go on the mainline, which meant I had four corners to choose from.

Each of my layout corner curves are 90-degree segments, so my super elevation had to start and end on the corner section because I didn't want to try and carry it over to the straight sections. The curve between Norlite and Mohawk Paper isn't a true curve and thus the super elevation wouldn't work there. One curve has a switching coming off into a yard, and I didn't want to mess around with super elevating curved switches as my first attempt, so that was out. The third curve between Southworth Machinery and Keis was laid months ago and I forgot about super elevation, and I wasn't digging it up. That left the fourth corner, which is the one next to the stairs. I will be highly visible, which should be nice.

There are many ways to super elevate curves, and I must have read about them all while scouring the internet and reading magazines. Tapered stripwood sounded okay but I didn't have any. I have read about sliding some electrical wire under the cork roadbed (or into a slot cut on the side of it) but that seemed pretty fussy. Strips up masking tape, built up in layers to create the ramp sounded pretty tedious. So, I went with something that Pelle Soeborg wrote about in Model Railroader a couple of years ago, which is gluing tiny pieces of stryene in various thicknesses to the underside of your track ties.

This seems like it would only work with stiff Micro Engineering flextrack or sectional track, because trying to glue the styrene on while having the track bend around is a recipe for the plastic falling off. Because I could prebend the Micro Engineering track to the shape of the curve and have it hold, I could precisely glue the styrene on the underside without fear of it breaking off. I used two thicknesses of styrene, 0.030" and 0.040", to build up the ramps. I glued it on with MEK, which is pretty strong stuff (but I had just knocked over the remains of my last bottle of Plastruct Weldene, and they don't make it anymore). I spaced the styrene about every other pair of ties, which worked well. I made sure the ramp came up gradually, as it only had about 40" of linear track to go up and come back down.

The placement of the styrene dictates the amount of cross elevation too. If you place it at the outside edges of the ties, it will be less than if you put it more towards the inner/center part of the ties. I chose a nice, gentle cross elevation, and experimented with a boxcar first and a level to see what I liked. I determined that gluing the styrene shims just under the outside rail not only created a gentle incline but also was very easy to duplicate. When I glued the track down with caulk, I was careful to pin it with the pins going at the angle of the track's cross elevation to avoid kinking it or having the caulk compensate for the styrene shims and thus remove the elevation I had built in.

Does it look good? I can't tell now with bare plywood, a blue concrete block wall backdrop, and no scenery or ballast. I won't really know until the scene is finished. But, it seems to run okay without tilting the trains off, which is a good thing. I will not ballast this section until I have run trains for awhile, because if it is too much I can use pliers to remove the styrene shims.

My super elevation is one more thing bringing me closer to my Civil certificate!