Barry's video link pretty much covers the ground truth on recycling. I live in a town that single-streams with curbside pickup, and my surrounding county requires sorting (You have to drive your recycling to a bin location). I talked with the county guy about the difference. He thought single stream was a bad choice. The buyers of recycle material want minimal contamination or the material goes to the landfill (if your recycle progam demands sorting, pay attention to what bin you toss stuff into). PET/HDPE bottles, aluminum cans, glass, newspaper, and corrugated cardboard are in demand as long as the "purity" is high.
The single stream gets trucked to the city where sorting takes place to get the easily identifiable and extract-able stuff out of the stream before it goes to the incinerator (which is upwind from my area) or landfill. The town promotes their single stream program as being the least expensive recycling service available.
I recently did cleanup duty after an event where we had clearly marked containers for sorting cans, bottles, and trash. There was so much mixing of cans and bottles that I couldn't take the bags to the county bins and used the town's single stream collection. Don't get me started on throwing food waste into recycling containers (talk about contamination!) - several bags of recycleables went directly to the landfill.
So, no, your discarded train items are not recycleable. Some future civilization will do an archaeological dig in our landfill mounds and wonder about the ancients and their toys.
