Keith:
My RealTrax is the newest version as it is only about two years old and is indeed hollow rails. I got it all workable. It was an eye opener to find MTH sold such shoddy track. But as time went along and my 99% MTH rolling stock increased, I came to realize that some MTH products seem to have a problem or two right out of the box new. What a shame to pay all that money and have to fix some new addition to get it to work properly. It has not yet been anything hard to fix by me. The switches were the worst. I had to tear all seven of them open and adjust the travel of the mechanism.
After several years I have gotten the layout to work reliably but not without work on my part to fix many of MTH's quality problems. I'm into MTH too far to change and I do like their DCS TIU and AIU and the control it offers. Lionel now offers an equivalent with Legacy, I believe. I realize I can use Lionel on my layout if I add some of their digital control modules but I just stuck with MTH because Lionel's stuff is made in China too.
Because my layout is so small at 7x9 it is basically finished with no physical room to expand. So my focus for the last year was populating the layout with structures. I arrive this year at "full" with an addition of 8 Banta craftsman laser cut structure kits I built. I have now moved to building rolling stock from Yee Old Huff n Puff and LeBelle. The Banta kits were a joy to build but the LeBelle passenger kit was very tough. Some of the YOHnP kits suffer from poor instructions but come out OK when I work around the poor instructions. What's after when the rolling stocks count exceeds my needs and capacity to store them off the layout? I really don't know? I'll not re-do the layout as my physical limits start to increase as I pass though my 70's. Maybe I'll be satisfied just running trains????
LDBennett
