Radio Shack's Rare Earth Magnets - Part Two

Or Model Railroading Fun with Magnetism As I said in the last post, the are two schools of thought on this on the NScale group on Trainboard Here's the test bed. Track is Atlas Code 55. You can see the three sets of magnets. One set stacked, one set at the end of a curve, and one in the middle of a straight run. As you can see in this next picture, the first set were mounted flush with the tops of the ties. When I stopped a couple of cars over them, MT Cars did not uncouple. However, using an Atlas car with accumates - they did uncouple. But it was because the accumate trip pin was pulled right down onto the magnet, at that point it was low enough for the other coupler to clear it. It was stuck fast to the magnet. Not good. Could be a source for derailments. Guess it works on unitrack. Just not my track. As you can see the second set of magnets were mounted underneath each rail, but at the end of a curve. (Tracks at the top of the next photo)The cars uncoupled about 30% of the time - if you ran the couplers back and forth over the magnets... The tracks in the bottom of the photo uncoupled almost everytime. Before I glue them in I need to "tweak" them a little, I think. The others will be removed or relocated. You can see the couplers in the "Open" position in the somewhat blurry picture below: Sorry about that last one. But there it is... Next post: Playing with the White Balance on my Camera.