What to do when you make a mistake ...

Well, what does one do when one has a problem with his track that is staring him in the face? That even those who are not as obsessed as me would say ... "Dude! What's up with that?" You figure out a way to fix it and if you are fortunate, it actually does!

The problem: A dip in on of the rails due to rushing through the laying of the ties and the roadbed, just so that he could see something get done. The first photo shows the problem, I think, but the second really does, here goes:

Well, it is not ferociously obvious here, because by the time I took this photo, I had already pulled up the spikes in this dip, in preparation of doing the repair.

In this photo, I have loosened all of the spikes in the area, and used an X-Acto knife with a chisel blade to lift up underneath one of the ties to show how much of a dip there was in the rail.

 If you look carefully under the tie in the center, you can see the scrap tieplate that I wedged in under the tie as a shim. I then proceeded to do essentially the same with the rest of the offending ties.

As the work proceeded, I only had two scrap tie plates, so I only needed to shim the ties up and hold them in place. Since this was going to be held in place with carpenters glue, I decided to use spikes as shims instead of tieplates. In this photo I am shoving the spike in under the tie.

I then flowed in some yellow carpenters glue to fix the ties in place. Everything is respiked and looks quite good. It isn't perfect, but as close as I can reasonably get it, so I am satisfied.