I love new track.

[richhotrain]

Darth,

Wow, very nice restoration work.

Send me your mailing address and a SASE.  I have some work for you to do on my AF stuff.  

Rich

[Darth Santa Fe]

richhotrain, thanks for the welcome, but I've actually been here a few times before. The first time was when I started restoring an old prewar Royal Blue set from American Flyer. The engine had no chassis, the cars were beat up and rusted (tank car had a bent frame!), and the track was even worse.

And after a couple years of work and some new Lionel track, it became this:


And as for why the track is all deformed, maybe they thought it would be the next evolution of the railroad and made a too quick decision, like when Athearn thought they should make the DD40. Or maybe they wanted reverse loops, which was too difficult with two-rail track.

lionelsoni, I don't know why two-rail track in the smaller scales is measured by its radius. Maybe it's so that it will sound smaller than the larger scales? "36 inch diameter? That's way too big! Oh look, 18 inch radius track. Now that should fit my area."

[lionelsoni]

I think it's ironic that non-Maerklin HOers measure their curve radii to the middle of the track, even though there's nothing there to measure to!  On the other hand, we three-railers traditionally measure the diameter to the outside ends of the ties, when there's a perfectly good center rail that we could use instead! 

[richhotrain]

Hey Darth,

Welcome to the CTT forum, you carpetbagger you.  

I, too, lurk on this forum while spending most of my time on the HO forums.

As an old American Flyer guy when I was a kid, I am permitted to hang around on the CTT forum.

I do have one question for you.  Why is all that new track deformed? 

It appears to have three rails.  

Rich

[Darth Santa Fe]

I decided to pull out the old O-27 Marx track I had cleaned up a couple years ago. Put it all together, put on a 999 with a full train behind it, and started it up. It moved around the loop...barely. So I went down to the local hobby shop and bought a large oval of brand new O-27 Lionel track. It cost me half as much as the small oval of O-42 track I got a couple years ago (I guess that's one of the big appeals of O-27!). Put it all together and powered it up. There is simply no comparison. The train ran around the new stuff effortlessly. That, and it looks 100x better.

The old track has probably 60 years of abuse and basement crawl-space storage on it. Track like this can be made workable, but it just can't compare to the brand new shiny stuff.

Now I'm waiting for a second Marx 50W transformer so I can run two tracks at once. I have two already, but only one that works. I also have a working American Flyer transformer, but it's only a 25W model and can't handle the trains very well. Because of that, I attempted to get the other Marx transformer working, but it's shorted internally and just isn't worth the effort when a newer one in much better shape can be had for only $12!