I have the Lionel Great Nothern Glacier Route Set. It came with Fastrack with a black center rail. I bought a 4 pack of 10" straight Fasttrack at Hobby Lobby (with the 40% online coupon) and its center rail is silver.
Is one batch newer or older or is just luck of the draw as to what color the center rail is?
Thanks
Garfield,
Only the very early production of FasTrack had the darkened center rail. Lionel quickly decided that it looked better without it.
Cheers!
Keith
Supposedly, the black chemical coating can cause sparking and pitting of rollers over time. I don’t have personal experience with this, since I use tubular, but I’ve seen that as a complaint in numerous posts. A lot of guys that use MTH Realtrax remove the blackening off the center rail.
It’s like Keith noted: The very earliest stuff came with a blackened center rail. Lionel rather quickly switched over to the silver center rail, and all of the switches, fitter sections, and so forth all have silver center rails.
I never had any real problems with the small number of black center rail sections that I have (or had) because I always remove the blackening from the very top of the center rail no matter whose track I use–Atlas, Lionel, MTH, etc. A track cleaning eraser, followed by a wipe-down with a clean scrap of cloth saturated with track cleaning fluid, makes short work of the blackening.
When I joined a modular club, which uses only Gargraves track (black center rail) I asked about this. The “old pros” said it was only MTH track that had this problem. Our 80’x28’ layout has been running fine for many years without the blackening being altered.
The black center rail on FasTrack “stuck out like a sore thumb” against the light gray roadbed, which was probably the main reason Lionel stopped making it. According to past comments by Lionel, they never expected FasTrack to sell as well as it has…so once they started to expand the offerings, having 2 “flavors” would not have made sense. Joe
Do I see a Lionel collectible down the road?
If they made so little of it, and it was only in starter sets, the only surviving pieces would seem to be in starter sets set aside by collectors, as most people who buy starter sets probably use the track to run the set.
While this post is partly in jest, it would seem to line up with the phenomena that made old (but certainly not new) baseball cards “rare”. The amount that survived intact over the years was somewhat low.
Another reason for the demise of the black center rail was that it inhibited the performance of TMCC. Looks better and TMCC works better without it covers it all.
Very best, Mike
Lionel_FasTrack_System Yahoo Group
I would not worry about its future value, who knows, someone could be just around the corner with a little marker type device that could easily blacken the rail and yours would not be worth more than the new stuff. On the other hand, some folks still have a “need” for the black center rail Fastrack and I think you could get better money by selling it on the Bay. Personally, I like the silver, looks fine.
Dennis
I don’t see the blackened center rail stuff becoming collectible (unlike Super O, for example, which had a relatively complete system). There are straight and curved FasTrack with the blackened center rail, but that’s about it. In my opinion, the stuff with the silver center rail looks as good as, or better than, the black rail items, primarily because of the lighter-colored molded-on roadbed.
IMO fasttrack looks so good in relation to Realtrax b/c center isn’t black