What causes the semi-gooey (lack of a better term) black stuff to build up on the rails? Wheel wear from plastic wheels? Residue from Track cleaner? Is there a way to prevent this? Whats the best way to clean track? I have N Scale.
Sorry so many questions. Thanks again for your time…
malcolm
I Don’t clean my track with the comerical products. I think the best way is to take the medal kind of sand paper and rub it over your track. Then take an old rag and spray WD-40 on it and rub that over your track. I just hope you don’t have a bug layout! I would also change to medal weel sets.
Use a “Bright Boy” style track cleaner (a small eraser) and rub the rails clean with it. Commercial track cleaning cars are available with pads on the underside to clean the rails with. Clean the locomotive wheels using a powered cleaner (don’t know the name, its red). Metal wheels help for the rolling stock.
Wheel wear from plastic wheels? YES.
Residue from Track cleaner? YES, if you mean the usual commercial liquids.
But also dust, dirt, etc. in the air, made worse by high humidity.
You’ll get lots of often-conflicting advice, either how to clean or using metal polish.
My personal preference is a CMX Clean Machine with acetone for the rails, and acetone on a Q-tip for metal wheels (and discard any plastic ones), as detailed in one of the threads listed below.
One thing common to all, though, is to be sure to clean ALL your wheels at the same time you do whatever you’re going to do to ALL your track – otherwise you’ll just re-contaminate the clean stuff!
Here are a couple of links to recent discussions here (there IS a search facility on these forums, by the way):
http://www.trains.com/TRC/CS/forums/1066638/ShowPost.aspx