I am not a fan of MTH Realtrax even though my 7 x 9 layout uses it almost exclusively. I have a MTH City of Denver tin plate train that will not go through an O-31 switch without shorting out the track due to single powered truck of the engine and unique design of the center rail pickups. I can not run that train on my layout. All the switches have guide rails that are so sloppy that the truck wheels can move such that they bump into the plastic frog. It is not enough to derail but makes a bump in the trains motion. A great percentage of the track section rails misalign because there are no pins in the rails to keep the rails aligned. Careful filing on the rails to eliminate both vertical and horizontal misalignments were necessary. On some of the points of some of the switches I had to open the switches up and adjust both the mechanism and the points themselves. The anti-derailment feature on all seven of my switches was disabled by the extra length of the anti-derailment switch section of track. Shortening those track sections so they were not touching the adjoining track section re-instated the anti-derailment feature.
I have a couple of three foot sections of Atlas Flex track used to smooth out a couple of track sections that had trains waltzing when using standard sectional track. Those section are now a smooth directional change. That is not a Realtrax problem just the result of my choice of my own track layout. But that Atlas track runs smooth and should have been my choice from the beginning along with better switches.
The problems with the Realtrax crossover does not surprise me at all. Realtrax as a sectional track system in my opinion is a failure.
LDBennett
