Track

If you’ve been involved in this hobby as long as I and, even if you have perused only half the number of model railway publications I have, you’ll have read or heard all the same clichés about track that I have over many decades: track is a model too, track is always in front of us while the trains are only in view temporarily and track is the foundation of good running. In spite of the fact that I’ve heard these statements repeated numerous times over the years, it doesn’t make them any less true. So why are they so often ignored by us modellers in the rush to get trains running?

I feel I can be forgiven for having track on my mind as I pondered a possible topic for this column of . On the day our esteemed editor made contact to prompt me to write the column I’d spent about five hours crawling around under the storage sidings of Morpeth. A fairly large percentage of this time had been spent trying to locate a short circuit and lay some track up to a new turntable I’d purchased several years ago, but had only recently been able to install. It occurred to me that track laying and wiring is one of those universal tasks faced by railway modellers the world over: no matter the scale, gauge or prototype, if you’re involved in railway modelling indoors then you will probably have spent some time hunched over