Is there a better way than soldering?

For more than 40 years I’ve soldered tracks where they join. Surely, there must be a better way to ensure electrical contact. I’ve had it with solder and soldering irons. I’ve changed layouts many times – too many to mention – and melting the soldered joints to separate tracks is time consuming and tedious. .

Is there a better way, say, liquid solder that dries, can be filed , allow power to pass and comes a apart easily and simply? Surely, there must be a product that can do the job. Or are there other methods?

GGB

Well, you can always make your own joiner plates and bolt your track together like the prototype. [:P]

Bolts are kinda tough to work with though. [:o)]

You could just slide the tracks together in the rail joiner and then solder jumpers between the tracks.

Rather then soldering the rail joiners, I attach feeder wires every 6 feet or so.

Nick

I’ve tried several so-called electrically conductive glues and always came back to soldering. It just works better. I’ve been doing it for several decades.

Electrically, I would think you’d get the most surface area contact with solder than anything else.

Tom

Having reviewed discussions on this topic on several threads before, I have to completely agree with pcarrell. My plan is to solder the joints only on curves (kind of hard to avoid that, unless I guess one uses sectional track) and not solder the joiners on straight sections. With this, I plan to drop feeders on every section of flex track. This may be overkill, but as I plan DCC, signal strength is very important. Not soldering the straight sections also allows for expansion/contraction at the joiner sites–as I plan on putting my roadbed over my plywood base, this can be important (my layout will be in my basement in Ohio, fluctruating temperatures, humidity)–this might be less of an issue if putting roadbed over foam.

Jim

Certainly cutting feeder wires is easier than disconnecting rail joiners. Even with DCC, terminal strips and many feeders will work.