Construction: laying cork

My first order of track came in a couple days earlier than expected, so I now have an assortment of switches to play with to get final alignment of some unlaid segments of spline subroadbed, as well as final alignment of the cork roadbed. For track, I opted for Walthers/Shinohara code 83 DCC-enhanced switches combined with Atlas Superflex code 83 flextrack. One disadvantage of this combination is that while the rails are both 0.083" tall, the Atlas ties are 0.020" thicker than the Shinohara track (apparently this is so that Atlas code 100 and code 83 track come out to the same railhead height). What that means for me is I need to find a source of inexpensive 0.020" (0.5mm) material (possibly sheet styrene?) to use as a shim under all the turnouts.

A quick trip to the local Rona showed that there is plenty of inexpensive silicone caulking available. I picked up several tubes of DAP Alex+ clear caulking for $2/tube. Well, "clear" is yet to be confirmed; according to the label it applies white (this I can confirm) and cures to clear after 7-14 days (we'll see). If it does indeed go clear then I'll use it to attach the track to the cork. Alternately, it does come in several other colours (white, almond (very light brown), dark brown and gray. If the "clear" caulking isn't to my liking, I'll use the grey one for attaching track; the colour should be very close to ballast colour.

The wisdom the Internet had revealed to me showed that the standard strategy for gluing down cork with caulking is to lay down a bead on the subroadbed and spread it with a putty knife. This worked, but I found it a little messy. I tried applying a bead directly to the underside of the cork strip, not spreading it, and applying the cork to the subroadbed and pressing in place. For my particular subroadbed construction this seems to work very well, as there are some minor irregularities between the triples of spline and Styrofoam strips, and with the bead of caulking on the cork directly, pressed firmly in place, the caulk seems to fill in all the necessary gaps without excessive spillover. On the subject of subroadbed irregularities, despite my best efforts there is inevitably some variation in top level of the 6 hardboard splines and 3 Styrofoam strips, but a Stanley Surform Pocket Plane is a fabulous tool for quickly smoothing it all out.

So, by the end of the night I'd emptied a box of cork (25x 3-foot sections) which accounts for about a third of the mainline. Next on the hitlist (now that I have actual physical track turnouts to check alignment with) is finishing the last piece of mainline subroadbed, the passing siding on the top of Marshall Hill. After that I can continue laying cork for most of the mainline and then (hopefully) onto track sometime next week!