Atlas O gauge track

The Atlas O gauge track is made of nickel silver and we thought it would be great to lay an O gauge 3 rail garden railway so we asked atlas to send us some track to review for this site. The track arrived and far exceeded our expectations. The scale ties and tie spacing is a great improvement over the 3 ties on standard tinplate track. The ties a plastic and have a neat little clip on the last tie to help hold the track joints together. The switches are well built except that the check ways are a bit narrow and shallow for some items (pre-war Lionel, Marx, and Hornby but if you want scale track way would you want to run these non-scale items?). The blackened center rail looks great and we were informed by atlas that the blackening would wear off with use, which it promptly did especially when I cleaned it. The rail sections are joined by slide on joiners similar to HO track except that these have little bolt heads stamped into them. We left track outside for a month and unfortunately the track has deteriorated badly. Here in NZ we have our share of UV rays and the plastic stood up well to the UV. But the nickel silver oxidized and I had to spend half an hour cleaning it to get a train to run. Now this track is great don't get me wrong I recommend it to anyone whose about to build a large indoor pike. Indoor this track beats tinplate track by far. But if you want to run your trains outside I don't recommend this (I also don't recommend tinplate track out doors) unless you're prepared to clean it every time you want to run trains. We've e-mailed Atlas about the problems a few times but so far have got no reply. Very few products get a 5/5 review and the Atlas 21st century track system truly deserves 5 stars the track does everything it was meant to do and its only flaw was it deteriorated when exposed to the extremes of New Zealands weather.	Photo coming soon
Produced by http://www.atlaso.com/