To pad or not to pad?

[VentureForth]

Do y'all put padding under Tomix or Unitrack tracks? Not as necessary as American styles, but does it help noise at all?

[Beaver]

It definitely does help on wooden surfaces, especially baseboards, tables and floors above ground level. Otherwise the surface can act like a sounding board, amplifying any noise.

 

I use 1cm thick foam based floor covering tiles.

[cteno4]

We’ve never had any noise issues on the club modular layouts. The modules are 5mm Luan ply on top and frame below only leaves like 18” square open areas max. They never drum. Usually enough scenery, buildings, etc to dampen this if it does happen. Don’t notice it on Ttrak modules either.

 

our early modules were a bit larger and used 1” foam with wood frames. The track was not attached down. Once an a while you would hear a little grumble here and there, but expect this was due to track not being attached.

 

if you find yourself pondering I would experiment with anything before doing a lot of padding.

 

cheers

 

jeff

[VJM]

My layout has no padding under the track and sits directly on painted ply.  Never had a problem with noise (or at least never noticed it). 

 

I find N gauge doesn't have the same affect as H0, where some H0 locomotives weigh in excess of 300gms and pull a train nearly 800gms or more.  This is a lot of stress/movement over unpadded layouts.

[Lina_Blue]

On my layouts, which are naked on the floor or LACK tables, it's not that noticeable as I thought. On the other hand: Highspeed Shinkansen on viaduct track are loud.

[VentureForth]

23 hours ago, Waisneed said:

On my layouts, which are naked on the floor or LACK tables, it's not that noticeable as I thought. On the other hand: Highspeed Shinkansen on viaduct track are loud.

 

Well, that would be hard to mitigate, but it also adds to the experience, imho...  🙂

 

[cteno4]

Yeah the viaducts are a bit hollow and loose connections to the supports so probably more vibrations can make it out. Plus just a lot of wheel sets going fast on a fulll shinkansen.

 

on the JRM layout you could hear the trains get a bit quieter on the sections of the viaduct that were fixed down to plywood strongly affixed to the modules and viaduct sections just s joiner clipped to piers that were fixed. On the new layout all the double viaduct are being attached to a base of 5mm ply that are hard fixed to custom wood piers. We found the viaduct sections s joiner clipped to regular piers attached down to the modules just did not stand up being taken apart, transported and reassembled. It will be interesting to see if there is a difference in the sound.

 

jeff