Curving HO Model Train Flex-Track with Ease

This is a piece of Micro Engineering flex track. Now, it's also weathered flex track, and much as I love Micro Engineering track and I use it on my railroad, this is code 70. Their use of the word flex in flex track is somewhat of a stretch. If you try to curve this stuff by hand, you gotta really be careful. You can do it, you can finesse it, but it takes a lot of work. John Rogers and some of his friends I guess came up with a technique that makes it much easier to do, and all you have to do is take a piece of scrap plywood, put a one-by-two backstop and one half of a tie width away from the backstop, draw the circle that you want, the radius of the curve that you want to achieve. In my case, it's 42-inch curve. This 42-inch curve will just put this piece of flex track right in the center of this arc. Take a piece of wood like a clothes pin or this little scrap piece of plywood, and you start battering your ties towards the end. Now, you're not gonna be able to hear me if I talk and batter at the same time. So I'll just whack this thing, and you'll see the track kinda undulate. You'll see it take some funny shapes. You gotta work from both ends. You gotta move it around. It's not just as simple as whack-whack and you're done, but watch this, and it'll curve this track right around. It's almost alive as you see it come around. Now, you can see we're getting close to that curve that I want, but it could be any curve, it doesn't matter. So one end of it is already there almost, and we'll try the other end now. Notice that I'm coming in from both ends because we want the ties to be radial. They're being battered from this. They're coming in from both ends by rubbing it with a stick. Now almost always, you get this straight section in the middle, and the way you get rid of that is you just shift where you're rubbing it from. Now, there's a bad kink right here, but we're very, very close to the desired end radius. Now, I would say I declare victory. Plant a flag and say we won because what we've done here is we've not only roughly curved the track the way we wanted it with almost no effort, but we've also loosened the ties. So now, when we go back and put it down on our actual railroad, you can put some glue under it and start pushing and pulling with your fingers, and you're gonna get this track to achieve a perfect arc. What's a perfect arc? Well, the only way you can tell is to put the track down, put some glue down, and sight down the end of it, and if there's any kink in it at all, you're eye'll pick that up much more quickly this way than anything else, even a template or something that you might have carved out. So here we go. We started with a piece of straight track, and now, with just a little bit of tweaking, we've got a curved track, and suddenly, the disadvantage of Micro Engineering's weathered rail, that is that it's hard to bend it much more so I think than their unweathered rail, is now an advantage because what we've got is this thing is now in an arc. You bend to any of the much more easily formed straight or a flex track from other companies, and you're gonna find that it bends back real quick. This is holding its curve, so I can do a bunch of these, carry 'em into the railroad room, and drop 'em down. Of course, you have to trim the ends. You always have to take the last tie off of any piece of flex track to allow room for the rail joiner. Put the rail joiners on. I don't solder my rail joiners as a rule 'cause I like the track to have a little room to move, but you do wanna have a feeder on every single rail. Over time, if you rely on rail joiners to carry the power between flex track, it's gonna corrode and it's not going to do the job for you. Why weathered rail is probably the last question we need to address. Frankly, when you put this down on the railroad and you clean the tops of it off gently with a Bright Boy, and never rub sideways because you'll scratch the rail. Go length wise. It already looks pretty good, and when you go back and start weathering it with airbrushing or chalks, those pens that Floquil sells that have like rust in them that you can wipe along the rail, the weathering on the rail gives a much better tooth for that weathering that's gonna follow. So I always start out with weathered rail. You can't get 'em on turnouts, but everywhere else, I use it. Simple, and it works like a charm.