Fellas with years more experience than I have will gently and firmly tell you that your rail joiners will fail over time. As in all things, there is a hard left and a hard right, with 80% of us falling within a stone's throw of some type of average. So, some guys will solder a feeder to every single section of track...bar none. Others are willing to join two and solder them together with a feeder end embedded in the solder...so now you have 6' of track fed with one feeder.
I am on my second layout, both of them being close to "middle" sized, the first with EZ-Track, the second with Atlas or Model Power flex-type...not sure what it is. I soldered three sets of feeders for over 26 feet of EZ-Track, and never once had a power drop-out in the 15 months that I used that first layout.
On my current layout, about twice as large from a track mileage point of view (folded loop design), I have many more feeders because I split the layout power-wise into the natural confines of each of the four box frames that comprise my open pit style of bench. I can saw through the ground goop landscaping, cut some wires, undo some bolts, and I should be able to remove each of the four frames one by one with some minor damage to track. So, where I have gaps, I need feeders on each side....basically.
I added a staging yard off the layout later...it became necessary and highly desirable all in the same hour...strange how that works.
In order to get to the staging yard, I had to bulid a long bridge spanning from the edge of the layout, behind a wood stove pipe along that wall, and then joining a large piece of fibre board that serves as the surface, to which I fastened turnouts and lengths of left-over EZ-Track and flex. To get to my point, I have all of this approximately 30' of various kinds of track, all joined with joiners and no solder, fed by exactly one pair of feeders that were meant to feed a small logging camp track at that close corner near the wood stove. One pair of 3' 22 gauge feeders that unfailingly allow DCC signal to awaken any QSI decoders left in a coma (triple shut-down using double-taps of F9) parked 12" away down one of the stub tracks.
Makes one wonder, doesn't it?
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