N-Scale Wheels

[Adelie]

Anybody have any experience, good or bad, with Atlas N-scale metal wheelsets? Looks like they are an alternative to NWSL and noticeably cheaper.

[MAbruce]

No personal experience, but I’ve heard from a few that like them.

The metal vs. plastic debate has raged for a while. I’m not going to take a stand on either side because both have their merits. The only stand I will take is what is most cost effective for me – which means if they came with plastic they will likely stay plastic. [:D]

[Adelie]

Thanks for the info. I hear you about cost effective. My main concern is dirt and gunk on the rails, not so much freer rolling wheels. My grades are fairly reasonable (2% down one helix to the layover tracks, and 2% back up the other side, all of which is optional). I'm also modeling mountain / high desert scenes, so double, triple and quad-heading is a common sight, mostly for effect. But anything that potentially cuts down on grime is a plus.

Atlas wheel packs are slightly less than a pack of NWSL.....other than the fact that there are 12 wheelsets in Atlas packs and only 4 in NWSL.

[MAbruce]

I hear you on the dirty rails. [sigh] One solution I found was to clean them with MAAS polish. I found that I can go months between cleanings (with plastic wheels). However, you need to clean by hand - which I can imagine would be an issue on large layouts and even more of a challenge with helixes. I have a portion of rail that goes through a tunnel, and while I did build in access to reach any derailments, cleaning track in there by hand is still tough.

I also find that if I don’t run trains on the layout for a few days, the locos wheels will need to be cleaned after the first time around. It’s as though they are picking up all the dust that settled on the tracks since the last time a train went around. After that, they can run for hours without any further problems.

Someday when my MRR budget is bigger [(-D], I’ll try out metal wheels.

[Adelie]

I think it was in Model Railroader where they were talking about advances in small battery technology that would one day (hopefully soon) allow us to talk to our battery-operated locomotives via radio controls, and skip the power/signal (DCC) through the rails dilemma.

Imagine, cleaning the track for cosmetic purposes only! [^]

My empire, still under construction (so rails get dirty every few days), is 40x14 in N-scale. I was smart enough (or lazy enough) not to inundate it with tackwork, so hand cleaning, while time consuming, is not necessarily a killer....except for the helixes, layover tracks and stacked loops of the dogbone. Even those are accessible enough, just a pain.