I just read that nickel silver Atlas 83 track wears out a lot faster than 100. What’s your experience with this? I plan to run a few hours a day with about 10 locos and Athearn BB freight cars with the plastic wheels.
Never heard of track ‘wearing out’. Where did you read this?
yeah, it will wear out eventually (as does everything) … but the thread wherein they were discussing this was in regards to club (or museum) layouts that had trains running tens of thousands of (scale) miles across the track over a lifetime of 30ish years. Causes of this likely being various methods of cleaning the tracks more than the wheels…
I’m sure our basement (or other suitable location) empires don’t really have much to worry about…
You are worried about wearing out MRR track?
I challenge you to do it. I bet you can’t.
The only way to wear out track is to clean it weekly with an abrasive such as a brite boy or sand paper over 10 to 20 years time.
Given that you are right, code 100 would take a little longer to wear out but nothing to worry about with either.
My guess if you tried to wear out the track by running say a loco on it 24/7 continously is that loco wpuld wear out long before the track.
I was talking about display layouts and some older club layouts (30 years+) and it’s due as much to the “thousands of scale miles” of running as well as the various cleaning methods used. Wheel wear has also been a concern especially with “plated” wheels.
As far as our home layouts are concerned, it’s not really an issue, maybe in 50 years! If you really run alot, in 20 years or so, some switch points might start showing some wear, but I wouldn’t be concerned about the track itself, regardless of code.
You’re more likely to see something fall apart than for the rail to “wear out”, like a turnout motor go bad or flextrack kinking due to humidity or something. I used to use Walthers code 83 turnouts, but got annoyed that the solder joints on the points of their turnouts would give way after a year or two. Wasn’t that big a deal to re-solder but IMHO it shoulda been built better in the first place. But the track itself showed no sign of wearing down even after 10-15 years.