The Spike Extruder

Even a small layout like Pembroke has surprising number of ties, and each of those ties takes one to four spikes. That leads to an alarming number of spikes.

Allow me to demonstrate with a little mental arithmetic. Pembroke is about 16 feet long, but most of it is two tracks wide. So it’s really 32 feet of track, or half a mile in HO scale. The ties are spaced on two-foot centres, so there must be about 1320 ties on the layout. That makes 5280 spikes. Alarming!

Up to now, I have had two options for installing spikes – either the scale spikes from proto87.com, or my bent-plastic spikes. Both of them were about 30 seconds per spike, yielding 44 hours to spike all the rail on Pembroke. Rather than a sign that I’d better crack on, 44 hours feels more like a deterrent.

Fortunately, while I was dribbling brown paint onto cattail seed heads, I noticed that I could use the syringe to precisely deposit a tiny dot of paint, and that it settles into an oval by the time it dries. The spike extruder was born!

Using the spike extruder, I can form a spike head in about seven seconds. That’s about eleven hours for the whole of Pembroke! It was so successful that after my first experiment, I went on to place spike heads for the remainder of the cattle pen spur, and for the throat at the south end of the yard. I only stopped because my knees got tired from kneeling on the shelf to access the throat.

To extrude a spike, plant the tip of the needle slightly off the rail base, with the hole facing toward the rail. Then lean the needle toward the rail, plunge a dot of paint, and move on to the next tie.