The rails at the base of a switch have gone out of gauge (confirmed with the NMRA N Scale standards gauge).  I've soldered track feeders to the base of the rails at this location, so it's possible I melted some of the plastic, although I was fairly quick with the soldering iron.  What's the best way to get the rails back in gauge?

Okay, by now most of us know what a chainsaw layout is. I can't quite say that I've ever had one - and with the current size of mine, it isn't likely I'll be tearing it apart anytime soon.

But... my layout has a sublayout of sorts. As an excuse to buy Z scale equipment without totally changing scales (according to my very perceptive wife), I decided to put in a Railroad Park type railroad on my layout. It's definitely not 7.5" gauge, more like 15", but it's as small as I can get without having to rerail cars with a set of tweezers.

Since this is my first blog post here, I figured I should give some background on my desired layout. I started out looking to do a proto-freelanced style layout based on Conrail in the mid-1990s. My research lead me to look at portions of Conrail's Lehigh, Reading, and Harrisburg lines for various track arrangments and design elements. The more I looked into this, the more I began concentrating on the Harrisburg line iteself. One of my desires was to have some Amtrak representation on the line so naturally, this led me towards the western end of the line, starting in Harrisburg.

Having just installed my first two QSI sound decoders, I must say I'm impressed, but only partially...