Experiment in track cleaning (including methods not recommended)

Wow - I had not seen this thread in ages.  Interesting to look back on this.  

I changed my ugly voltage test car to one closer to what Ace has, and as I said  on another thread now, I just push it in front the the ATSF passenger set which draws about 8 to 9 amps, instead of having a load on it itself.  

BTW - I used #8 copper twist as feed wire every ten to twelve feet when I did my new Atlas track - overkill wire size, yes, but even across the room, with perhaps a bit more than 50 feet of run (back and forth), it means that I have no more than about .25 volt drop anywhere on the layout, and that my power supply breakers (Z4000, CW80) and in-line fuses will always see a short circuit, even a marginal one, and clear it quickly.  

Lee, have you thought about "Simple Green"? 

Don

could not resist could you don?   I thought the same thing.

Cleaning the track may only be half of the equation. Unless you clean all of the wheels that roll over it, the dirt will reappear on the tracks in a very short time.

My experience is that 91% isopropyl alcohol works well to clean up Gargraves track. (I have stainless with the blackened center rail, which is not stainless.) However the track soon got dirty after running trains. Then I checked the wheels on my locomotives and cars and they were dirty. After cleaning all of the wheels (a tedious process) things stayed clean for a while.

My pet theory was that the traction tires were contributing much of the grime. I have two parallel main lines, so after cleaning track and rolling stock wheels, I put a non-traction tired locomotive on one main line with its train and a loco with traction tires on the other main line with its train. After a week of running (about an hour/day) I re-cleaned the track, expecting to find much more dirt on the line with the traction tired loco. (I had "cleaned" the traction tires by wiping them with a dry paper towel prior to the experiment.)

It didn't work out that way. Both lines had about the same amount of dirt, which wasn't that much after a week. I would be curious to run the same experiment with a locomotive with smoke on vs. one without it, though it would be hard to control for the drift of the smoke. It could be done by running the experiment sequentially but that would require cleaning a bunch of wheels all over.

Some genuine scientific data in this area would be very useful and Lee and Ace's work is a good step in that direction.