Years ago, when I started in model railroading, the only thing you could purchase as far as track went was brass rails.
If you know anything about brass, you know that it is an excellent conductor of electricity, which is why the manufacturers chose it.
Brass was the standard for a long time, even up to 20 years ago. Nowadays, the only way you can find it is if you obtained it in an auction sale or somebody just happens to be selling it from their grandfather’s old layout; maybe you might find it here or there on eBay. But manufacturers no longer make brass rails.
The question then unfolds as to why?
While brass is a great conductor of electricity, it also needs to be cleaned frequently, sometimes before everyday operation. The other thing about brass is that it is a very soft metal and can be easily bent or dented. It didn’t take much for brass to get a little dirt on the rails and cause your engines to stutter.
Then along came nickel rail. It is a much heartier metal, about the same when conducting electricity, and it stayed cleaner longer. Thus, this is the reason manufacturers switched to nickel rail.
Nickel rail is much nicer to us model railroaders, but it still has to be cleaned from time to time, just not as often as brass rails.
If you are wondering just how rails get dirty, here is my explanation.
Contrary to what many modelers believe, dirty rails are not just from a dusty environment or sitting unused for long periods of time. Although that can be part of the problem, even if you took extra time to cover your layout with plastic or some kind of covering because you are unable to run on it for long periods of time, when you come back, you may still find that you have to clean the rails before you can have smooth-running engines on it again.
Every time you run your engines on the rails, you are creating “spark oxidation.”
If you turn off your lights and run your engine in complete darkness, you will see exactly what I mean. You will notice that at every joint in your rail with the smallest gap, there will be a tiny spark. These sparks leave, after time, a noticeable black film on your rails. It will be darkest at the joints, but each time you run over these black marks, you are not only creating more, but they also rub off onto your engine and rolling stock wheels, thus leaving an invisible trail of black oxidation from the spark. If you leave it uncleaned long enough, the black oxidation becomes visible. Not only visible, but it also starts to affect the electricity connecting from your wheels to the motor, creating the stuttering or stopping of your engine from moving.
If you think your rails are clean, I challenge you to take any lint-free cloth, a paper coffee filter, or even just your finger. Run it over a small section of a rail, and you will see the black oxidation that was on the rail.
So every time you run your engines, no one can prevent it; it’s just the law of physics, but you are creating dirt on your rails.
I have written a post earlier about how to clean your rails and what you can use to limit or slow down the oxidation, but no matter what you do, at some point the time-consuming chore of cleaning the rails is going to have to be done.
This is one of the reasons why, when you build a layout, you want to be able to easily reach every single inch of your rails and to build some sort of a removable top to a long tunnel or at least have some way of accessing those rails under the tunnel. It’s not only for derailment possibilities but also to clean those rails.
So there you have it, just one of the reasons why you get dirty rails.
Until next time,
Happy Railroading!