Eric's O-Scale Railroading Journal

The Aztec Typhoon track cleaning car that I bought a couple weeks ago turned out to be a little disappointing and I’m going to have to get the CMX ‘clean machine’ car instead. The car itself is nicely built, but I think that the main flaw in it is the same flaw that any roller-style cleaning car has. By that I mean that if you want to clean anything, the best way to clean it is to scrub it, not roll over it. For example, if I want to clean my kitchen counter I don’t put cleaner on a rag and then roll the rag over the counter. I put cleaner on the rag and SCRUB the counter. Having a cleanser soaked roller that simply rolls over the rails scrubs nothing and therefore doesn’t really clean the track very well. So while the idea of the cleaning roller sounds cool and may look cool on paper, in reality it doesn’t really work that well. The CMX ‘clean machine’, on the other hand, does not use a roller and instead actually scrubs the rails with a stationary pad and therefore cleans the rails much better. The other weakness that the Typhoon has is that you have to glue to cleaning pad to the roller. This means that almost any strong solvent cleaner is going to eventually dissolve the glue and loosen the pad. Even worse, the dissolved glue may get on the track and then you end up with track that is dirtier than when you started. This is, in fact, what happened when I first used the pads that came with the car. the solvent I used liquified the glue and the pad material and ended up leaving a nasty residue of white goo on the rails! I’m going to continue to work with the car and try to modify it to work more effectively but in the end I think the CMX car will be the best solution.