Thanks for all of your advice on the benchwork. Benchwork is complete (unpainted and unstained. Thanks.) Onto the trackwork. Visited my LHS to see, touch, kick the tires, etc. regarding Atlas, Peco, Walthers/Shinohara and Micro-Engineering. (HO Code 83). I was looking for realistic-looking trackwork, and asked advice of the shop-keep as to reliability and performance. My opinions, 1) I liked the look and feel of the Atlas and Peco (but almost 2X the price), 2) The Walthers was sloppy looking, had excess flash everywhere, and the ties looked poor, and 3) He had no ME. Said it had to be special ordered, as he doesn’t like to stock ME because it doesn’t sell too well. His opinions, 1) Didn’t like ME, poor QC and performance issues over the years, 2) Shinohara makes poor turnouts, poor quality product, 3) Peco and Atlas are good, but is Peco 2X the price better than Atlas. Said everyone uses Atlas, product always available, and is very strong, reliable and durable track.
Anyway, just wondering if anyone wouldn’t mind throwing in their 2 cents regarding their favorite track. Am pretty much sold on the Atlas, have downloaded their RTS software, and will fiddle around with it tonight. Just curious as to other’s thoughts on track brands. Thanks in advance for any help. GL.
Since I’ve been out of the hobby 35 years and just now getting basck in you might want to take this advice with a grain of salt. Back then commercial track didn’t look so good. From what I’ve seen in the local hobby shops my opinion hasn’t changed much.
The trouble now is that it looks too uniform. Take a walk along any track. You’ll see it’s not that good. Back then I layed all my track by hand. Cut the ties and also made the switches with a template that I made myself. Believe me it looked better than anything I’ve seen around now.
Best of all, you don’t have the miserable job of cutting ties anymore. There are a couple of places that sell 7x9 sugar pine ties just like I used to cut. You can then soak them in color and weather them in the middle.
I use Atlas track almost exclusively. I put it down as is with no weathering at all and it looks just fine to me. For those who think it looks too uniform, there are numerous weathing techniques you can use that are simple and much less time consuming than hand laying track. I can’t imagine anything in this hobby more tedious than laying individual ties and stapling rail to it or anything that produces so little positive benefit for the time spent. And if you buy the prefab tie, aren’t you going to end up with the same uniform look in your ties you are trying to avoid.
You know Ocean, its funny that that’s almost what the guy helping me at the LHS said. I saw the Central Valley turnout kits and said I’d be too afraid of even trying. He told me that this is not rocket science, and that by my 4th turnout, I’d have a very good-looking and very good-working piece of track. Might give it a shot sometime, but right now, I need volume, otherwise, I’ll be retirement age before I finish. Thks.