brass and nickle silver

[nachoman]

I would only add one point about plastic wheels. I have never seen any evidence of plastic wheels leaving residue on rails, but before I switched over to metal wheels on my rolling stock, I did find that the plastic wheels would really clean the rails. Unfortunately, all of the dirt that they pulled off the rails was deposited on the wheel treads! I found out about these deposits when I had cars suddenly derailing at places I had never had any problems at before. When I inspected my trains I found that the wheels of my locomotives were clean, but there appeared to be no flanges left on my freight cars! I spent a couple of hours with alcohol in a bowl cleaning wheel sets one night, and repeated the process on a regular basis on all of my Athearn blue box cars until I noticed that they were beginning to roll very badly due to rust on the steel axles! I then switched out the Athearn wheel sets for Kaddees, and later P2k, or Intermountain. I never saw any evidence of the plastic wheel sets deteriorating, but between the gunk pick up on the wheels and the rusting of the axles, I gave up on most of them. I think the only plastic wheel sets I have left on anything are on a couple of my cabooses.

That's just my hunch. It's like tires on your car - just rolling causes little bits of rubber to wear off until you need new tires. I assume a plastic wheelset would be the same. I have some older ones that have noticeable wear on the tread, and I assume that plastic dust gets deposited on the layout. I don't consider the problem severe enough that I would fork over my limited hobby money in order to replace all my wheelsets. Instead, I replace problematic ones with metal as needed. The same would be true with brass track. If I had a layout that has some brass track, I would not waste my time and money replacing it just because I think nickel silver works somewhat better. Brass may take more effort to keep clean, but my experience is that that extra effort probably would not justify the time and cost.