Jim,
That is a great idea about wedging a spade connector into the split rail from the bottom. Unfortunately, I am using rubber roadbed with all of my track, so I am blocked.
I did do some test soldering wthout a problem. Why do you say it can be tricky? In my test soldering, I stripped the insulation off of about 1/4 inch of stranded wire, then bent the exposed wire at a 90 degree angle and soldered. It held securely.
Rich
I have never had any trouble with (14 AWG) wire soldered to the inside of (O27) rails. You may also find that your flanges clear your wire just fine; and the connection is much less visible that way.
Consider soldering only short tap wires to your rails, with the bulk of the feeder wires under the table and connected to the taps with wire nuts. That way you can easily remove the track section if you ever need to; and the size of your feeders is not limited by what you can solder to the rails.
Besides spade lugs, you can also stick male Faston lugs and ring lugs into the bottoms of rails.
Bob,
That’s a great point about the feeder wire. As my screen name suggests, I am primarily an HO scale modeler operating in DCC. The best practice there is to run a set of bus wires under the layout and drop feeder wires to the bus wires.
Rich