The silvery glint...
I'm a pilot, and one of my favorite joys it looking down on a real train that looks as small as a model from that perspective. When the sun angle is right there is a brilliant silvery glint from the real steel rails, a visual that I find iconic to railroading.
I have always missed that silvery glint in my modeling. I am disappointed by the color of brass or nickle-silver rails; they just never look right to my eye. Steel HO track gives that prototypical silvery glint I seek, but everyone shouts warnings that steel rail is not a good electrical conductor, and creates a constant track cleaning problem.
Dead rail is the solution for me! Hubby and I have finally made the commitment: we are going to do our layout entirely with steel flextrack, and all electricity to the locomotive will be carried on-board each train. All the DCC features function normally, they just get their power from the battery nistead of the rails, and the radio receiver provides the commands to the DCC that would normally come through the rails. The electrical connections from the battery and from the r/c receiver to the DCC are simple enough for even my fumble-fingers, and the resulting train performance is indistinguishable from good rail-powered DCC. We probably will want to run some wires on the layout to light buildings and such, but all the complexities of track wiring will be avoided.
So far the biggest negative we have found is that quality steel-rail turnouts are hard to come by. I find the Bachmann and Life-Like steel rail turnouts less than ideal. Anybody know a source of better quality turnouts with steel rail?
Diane