brass and nickle silver

[nachoman]

There is really no need to get into chemistry specifics here - because we have plenty of experimental evidence from our own personal experiences.

My experience with brass track was from back in the days in which I ran locomotives with pancake motors and 4-wheel pickup. Some of my performance problems were obviously related to the locomotive and not the track, but it did seem like I had to run a bright boy over the rails before every time I wanted to run a train. I still have a few steamers with brass driver tires, and they do require more frequent cleaning than those with nickle silver tires.

If brass rail was still available, I would still choose nickle silver because of appearance alone. For me to sacrifice appearace, brass would have to perform significantly better (it doesn't) or it would have to be significantly cheaper (it's not).