Cleaning Track

I use CMX Track Cleaning car and have excellent results with my Atlas track. If it is clean and you run trains then the dirt is coming from all the wheels onto the track.

I have used Acetone for 20 years,I tried many different alternatives until I started using Acetone with a clean rag with Acetone and following up with a clean dry rag,job done.do this with power off and open doors for Ventilation.

Mikey

Read down to a list of cleaning agents. Higher dielectric constant is better. There was an article about this in a magazine (don't recall the issue) explaining why. I have a friend who had to clean N gauge track often and then tried wd40 sparingly on a cloth. He didn't have to clean for months. I use Deoxid D5 sparingly.

https://ogrforum.com/...g-track-with-acetone

@EastonO posted:

There have been many posts about track cleaning, and I have read them all. Until recently, my track has been in climate controlled space. I'm putting up a new layout and have cleaned the track with the following methods:

1. wiped it down with clean rag, very dirty  2. cleaned with magic eraser, very dirty 3. cleaned with isopropyl alcohol, was still very bad  4. Cleaned with thinner, and the rags continued to be filthy. Did all this until all rags were clean. Ran trains, signals were all 10's for DCC everywhere. Decided to use a larger eraser just to check, it came away filthy.

Any thoughts about what's going on. It's Atlas 3 rail track. Trains are running fine, the track just continues to be extremely dirty.

Thank you, Terry

Your Atlas track is made of Nickel Silver (NS).  When exposed to air, NS oxidizes and the oxide is black.  Wiping the track wipes off the oxide so your rag gets black.  Come back tomorrow, it will get black again.  The nice property of NS is that the oxide conducts electricity just fine.  Trains run great with the oxide in place. 

Back in the day, HO track was largely made of brass.  Brass also oxidizes in the air, but the brass oxide is NOT electrically conductive.  If brass track was not cleaned very frequently, trains wouldn't run.  NS with it's conductive oxide was a huge step forward.

The article on dielectric constants was in the May, 2019 issue of Model Railroad Hobbyist online magazine.  I use odorless mineral spirits to clean my track, which ranked highly on the list of preferred solvents.  Here is a link to that article.

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws...ne/index.html?page=9

Nickel Silver has no silver in it. No one said it did, but I wonder about the conductivity of it's oxide. It's usually something like 60% copper, 20% nickel, and 20% zinc alloy. I don't have any information as to it's oxide resistivity, but it's probably quite thin and maybe not too much of an issue. I have read that oxides in general are not very conductive. I think I believe the best approach is to have a very slight film of a non polar solvent on the surface and avoid the oxide as much as possible.