HO Track and which way to go

[scruffy]

Hi,
I'm a newbie at this age old hobby as is appears today to me. I grew up with a HO set of model trains from the time I was about 9 to about 14 and lost interest as many teenagers do (btw I'm 40 now). My parents decided to keep all my old sets stowed away in boxes and I want to get them set back up & see if they will still run. Now mind you I have absolutely no experience with the "DCC" system or what it does as my old system ran completely on transformers. So while surfing around the model train shops online I've seen that when ordering the HO track to rebuild my layout that there's a whole bunch of different codes (55, 70, 83 & 100 to be exact) so I need someones help in deciding what all these different codes mean. It seems like to me that when I was a kid 26 years ago that when you went to the hobby store to buy HO track it was one scale, one size & one type of track, the only difference I remember is deciding what metal the track is made out of. If my memory serves me right my original layout was all brass track. Thanks in advance for any help or insight anyone here can provide.

 

[jeffrey-wimberly]

Since it's HO and considering the age of your equipment you need code 100 track as it's very possible that your wheels have what are termed 'pizza cutter' flanges. The older equipment had big flanges to better withstand rough track and stay on the track at the high speeds the old motors drove the train to. As for converting these old locos to DCC you might have the proverbial tiger by the tail here. Many older models have the motor grounded to the frame and in some cases the motor is IN the frame. That gets really tricky as the motor brushes MUST be isolated from the frame. There were some locos made that had the brushes isolated from the frame and connected to the wheels pickups by wires, such as the GP40 that was made by Roco for Atlas. It will probably be a lot easier to buy new locos. The two types of track on the market today are steel and nickel-silver. You're much better off with the nickel-silver track in my opinion. It's easier to keep clean and your trains will still run good on it when it's dirty up to a point.

 

[UP2CSX]

Jeffrey gave you a lot of good advice. The first thing I would do is inventory the locomotives and rolling stock you have. There were some good quality locomotives around 30 years ago like Athearn, Bowser, and some Mantua's. Unfortunately, a lot of it was very poor quality, like Life-Like, Tyco, AHM, and Bachmann. These are probably not worth the effort to convert to DCC. Same thing with the rolling stock. Some of it may work fine on code 83 track and others may have the large flanges and, in most cases, either gross or missing details compared to what's available today. Code 100 track is what you have. This just refers to the height if the rails, with code 100 being the tallest and code 55 being the smallest. The advantage of code 83 is the rail is closer to typical prototype size and more track components are only being made in code 83. Any existing code 100 track should still be usable. Brass track oxidizes faster than nickel silver but it still works fine with a good cleaning.

If you can, post some pictures of what you have here. We can give you a pretty good idea of what's feasible to use today and what's not.