FWIW, you can go quite a distance without drops with normal track pins of they're all done decently. When I was laying out my track, I first laid all the track and just soldered the drops and dropped them through the table. They were not connected anywhere, so all I had was track pin. At the time I had over 300 feet of track down, and I was able to run all over the table with one connection from a PH180 brick! The only exception was the lift bridge which obviously requires connections since there are no pins connecting it. When I checked with a 2 amp load on the opposite end of a 24 x 12 layout from the single power connection, I had about a 1.5V power drop, not too bad for what I was doing.
Of course, now I have a total of around 60 power drops all over the layout wired in a bunch of home-runs to the power panel, I wasn't about to actually try to run that way!
