Derailment Trouble Repair

Ran into some problems here in the last little while, in the way of track issues. Might sound crazy, but this seems type of thing seems to happen when the winter arrives and then again as summer gets here.  Two examples of problems are below:

First, one of my railcars, just one mind you, consistently de-railed at one spot. With a little closer examination, here's what the cause turned out to be...The curved stock rail had developed a nasty inward kink to the left of the switch rod.

I removed the switch, and tried to epoxy the rail back into place, and left it to cure overnight. The epoxy didn't work out, so I scraped the epoxy out and tried gluing with CA and allowing that to cure for a day, but the rail didn't hold in place with that either.

Nothing much to see here with the broken switch removed. I was able to slide all 6 rail joiners back, so then I misted the ballast with water/alcohol mix and lifted the switch out.  I cleaned up the cork roadbed with a paint scraper. 

I found and ordered a new switch from the Otter Valley Railroad website, and it arrived in a couple of days. Always good service from them.

The new switch is a Peco "Unifrog" type.  I'll use that Floquil marker shown above to paint the rails.

And so here is the new switch installed on the GTW and working just fine

I did paint the rail sides (I think that's called the "web") with that paint pen, but I'm not too crazy about the colour they turned out.  Looks too brassy now, so I guess I'll still have to go over them with some brown paint.

Changing gears now, here's a really nice photo that was posted on fb by Lorraine Morrill looking west toward the sunset last week at the Sarnia VIA station.

Such a nice picture

So that's it for now. Have a great week everybody.