The track I was using at the time was brand new Atlas track. The problem was with the F Units. I’ve never seen locomotives dirty the track like they did. If I cleaned the track and cleaned the F unit wheelsets, in an hour or so everything was dirty again, with poor pickup. I got rid of the F Units and have rarely had any track dirt issues since–whether with Atlas or Kato track (I now have all Kato).
The sound equipped steam engines are more finicky about the track cleanliness–but I’m finding the MTH steamers (running on DCS) are far more tolerant than the other guys’ are of track dirt (when running plain DC).
I belive the Genesis Athearn F unit wheel issues have been discussed elsewhere, but it came down to some bad plating during production that caused excessive arcing and created the power pick up issue, new wheels from either Athearn or NWSL solves this problem. We have lots of power pick up problems with the Bachmann ez-track(nickel silver version) at the local shop, it has to be cleaned every friday when we fire up the shop layout. It doesnt look dirty, but everything we try to run on it stumbles. These are engines we bring from home and are cleaned prior to that day. We hope to retrack this layout with Atlas snap track soon.