Mixing nickel silver with brass track?


Guilford Guy9887

Guilford Guy9887

Northeast Railfan
I'm starting my new layout this week and I bought 75ft of flex track but I didn't buy any turnouts because I thought I had some NS turnouts, but after looking they are brass. My 2 questions are:

Will there be any issues if I mix the two?

If I convert to DCC can I use brass track?
 
Maybe, and yes. Brass track needs more cleaning because the brass oxide is not conductive. Cleaning switches can be difficult. Nickel Silver is also more conductive than brass so if you have brass, you may have to add more feeders since the brass track may cause signal degradation.
 
Short term, probably not a lot of trouble. If everything is clean, you should be good to go for quite some time. I hope you are using at least some metal wheel sets...that will help to keep the brass and the N/S rails clean.

However, there probably is a time-sensitive fly in the ointment, and that will be electrolytic action between the brass and the joiners and the N/S rails. Joiners are horribly unreliable anyway after a year or two, and most of us resort to either feeding all the rails with soldered feeders or soldering feeders to the joiners and soldering those joiners as well to ensure good contact with their mated rail ends.

There is a lot of brass still being used and bought and sold between long-time hobbyists. It can't be that bad.
 
I have a mix of brass and N/S and plan to use both. I had some steel in the mix too, but decided not to use it. I do plan to run a lot of feeders (probably not every piece of track, likely every 3' or so) and solder most joints.

Doug
 
I have NS flex and Brass turnouts, and other than soldering all the joiners, no issues in 25+ years. I run a cleaning car in the mix every so often for maintenance, and the aforementioned metal wheels on everything that rolls.
 
You could try, but there's no point. The GLEAM method burnishes the rail head so that gunk doesn't stick to it, but the brass still corrodes into this non-conductive gunk. GLEAM prevents stuff from sticking to the metal. Corrosion IS the metal (or rather was)
 
Ok. I had been thinking to Gleam the track meant that you were creating a very thin stainless steel surface on the top.
 
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