No matter what scale of model train you run, derailments can put a damper on your fun and the entire hobby railroading experience.
Another thing about derailments is they make a statement about you, the engineer, and your competence level with your train.
If you are the person in charge of your model train setup, ultimately you are the one who must take the blame for everything that goes wrong, and the praise when everything goes right.
If you are avidly into the whole model train hobby, you spend many hours making your setup look the best that it can, so it is equally important to perform the activities that will make your train function and operate properly and as designed.
It All Begins with the Design Like most model train hobbyists, you probably based your design on the amount of space you had readily available to set up your train.
Design wouldn't be that important if you could run your locomotive setup over large areas of land or unlimited benchwork area, but under the space constraints that you have, some things you want to do might not be possible.
Curves are the more obvious situations that lead to derailments, followed by hills.
One of the best design considerations is to make every curve with a longer radius than is the minimum recommended by the manufacturer.
This can be difficult within the confines of your limited space, but it is no doubt an important concern.
Never, ever, design your layout with a radius less than recommended if you want to avoid derailment issues.
Under certain conditions, it may be necessary to bank the curves not only to guard against overturned cars, but also to create more realism in your railroad layout.
This is tricky and usually takes a good bit of tweaking to make it work properly on your benchwork.
Tackling hills can separate the hobbyist from the real engineer.
If you have plenty of space, hills are one of the great additions to your track layout, but many beginning train enthusiasts make the elevation changes too quickly for the length of track used and just invite continuing problems.
When you decide to incorporate hills in your setup, you must have the necessary patience required to work with the design enough to be sure you don't create more problems than you can reasonably fix.
Flex track is great for grade changes as well as sections of curves.
This flexibility brings some modelers to believe they can make their trains do anything that the flex track will allow.
That's simply not true, and the use of flex track must always be limited to slight inflection rather than great variation.
Fine Tuning Your Train Tracks Any track can appear perfect if you don't look closely, but we all know that tracks move and shift, expand and contract and most notably, cause havoc with the operation of our trains.
If it were possible to keep tracks from moving at all, we wouldn't have nearly as many headaches with the wreck of the Old '97 as we do.
Since we know there is going to be track movement, we have to understand where the most shifting is going to occur.
In a long straight run of track, there isn't much to worry about, but in turns, you have the weakest point in the track and the place to expect the most movement.
It is very important to sand the track at these locations where they don't flawlessly match up.
A slight misalignment of track will become worse under movement, especially in a stress point.
Although it should go unspoken, variation in tracks because of different manufacturers or simply buying a similar sized type of track is an almost sure way to cause railroad accidents.
Stick with the same manufacturer for your entire track.
If the flex track is not made by your track manufacturer, it can cause a problem, but most often, you will be safe if the scale matches.