Dirty Locomotive Wheels

[LV LOU]

    Al,I bet your track has all the plastic frogs on the inside,and that's the side that gets dirty.I ran Atlas C80 on my last RR.On the bottom two tracks,there were no switches.The double track railroad just ran around and through the landscape,a way I could run large trains on a small RR,the actual "railroad" started on the second level.The bottom two tracks kept relatively clean,the top was horrible.Only difference was the plastic frogs,and they were on both sides of the track....

[alhoop]

    Al,I bet your track has all the plastic frogs on the inside,and that's the side that gets dirty.I ran Atlas C80 on my last RR.On the bottom two tracks,there were no switches.The double track railroad just ran around and through the landscape,a way I could run large trains on a small RR,the actual "railroad" started on the second level.The bottom two tracks kept relatively clean,the top was horrible.Only difference was the plastic frogs,and they were on both sides of the track....

All my turnouts -Peco,Shinohara and 2 Atlas have metal frogs like the Peco electrofrog- don't recall about the two Kato double crossovers. I modified all Pecos and the two Atlas turnouts to have metal frogs. I can tell you how to turn an InsulFrog into an ElectroFrog, even if already installed, if you wish.

Here is one half of my layout and as can be seen there are turnouts left and right.

/>
Al

[peteski]

Al, even if the throttle was modified for AC signal, that was either a pulsating DC or DC with a small portion of AC component riding on top of the DC signal. The big portion of the power going to the model was fixed-polarity DC.  If you truly applied AC to the track, the locomotive would not run - it would just sit in place making buzzing noise at the frequency of the AC signal.

EDIT: you mention that the dirt accumulation occurs while the loco is pushing a cleaning car. Is it possible that the masonite pad is not evenly balanced, so one side of it cleans more gunk of the track than the other side?