Chuck and Chip have the right answer for the ultimate in rolling reliability. Another advantage to rolling your own besides custom geometry and reliablility is that the wiring is your choice, not the manufacturer's. If you need live frogs to avoid stalls and flickering lights, your make your frogs live. If you want to avoid shorts from the backs of wheels at the points shutting down your DCC, you wire the points to the adjoining stock rails from the get go.
Final advantages to rolling your own are cost and appearance. Cost of materials is $3-$4 at most. And no ugly black plastic frogs or guardrails. Just smooth-riding metal frogs with on-spec flangeways that prevent wheel drop and frog picking, and look much more like the prototype to boot.
yours in handlaid track
Fred W
John
Chip
Building the Rock Ridge Railroad with the slowest construction crew west of the Pecos.
Kato
Otherwise, I prefer Peco.
Peco.
A bit more $$ than Atlas, but no motor or even ground throw needed to hold the turnout rails in proper position.
I find them much more solidly built and as a result more durable in the long run than the Atlas ones. Yet they match perfectly with Atlas C100 track.
K
In my case, the only acceptable choice (for any application, not just hidden staging) is:
Hand laid, rails shaped with a 10" mill file, laid on wood ties with real spikes and soldered with a 325-watt Weller hand cannon.
That's what I'm using, and I challenge anyone to match my trackwork for reliability with anything they can buy in a package from an E-tailer or LHS. Not only that; I can set up some really strange track geometry (like yard throats on sweeping curves) that simply can't be duplicated with commercial shake-the-box products.
As for Atlas - thanks to the plastic frogs, they are totally useless to me. Some of my most-used rolling stock only picks up propulsion power from one short-wheelbase truck on each side, and the pickup doesn't span the plastic. Switching at realistic slow speed results in a full emergency stop at every turnout.
Rolling your own turnouts isn't difficult. Even this arthritic old coot can do it.
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - on hand-laid specialwork)
This is bound to create some lively "discussion" but what brand of HO turnouts would you choose for hidden staging tracks? Of course, since they will be hidden, they need not be perfectly scale. They just have to work reliably, year after year, with minimal maintenance.
I'm thinking good-ol Atlas Mark III with maybe a curved Peco or two if my still-under-development track plan (an around-the-walls 20 x 30 plan) requires them. Probably Code 100 Atlas flextrack in the hidden areas & 36"R curves. And to increase the reliability factor, I plan to use the highest number frogs that I can. Ruling equipment will be steam locos up to 2-8-8-2 and 80ft passenger cars. Remember, this question is in regards to hidden/marginally-accessible trackage only.
I did a search on this subject but got a lot of "clutter" in return.
Thanks for your inputs,
Harvey Hartman
Houston, TX