I have yet to set eyes on newer Realtrax with the hollow rail, but I have plenty of older stuff...that is becoming brittle and breaking. BUT this is more about the electrical flow of same.
There were, evidently, two types of connectors used on early track. One type had a rounded, large tab on the bottom of each outer, grounded rail. Picture shown below. Somewhere along the line, they dropped that, and put a gnded tab, like the other smaller tabs.
The advantage to the first type, is that the larger tab is perfect to solder a wire to, if you want to drop under the board to use gnd for activation. It was also good, if you wanted to solder a wire from one end of the track to the other end, with a wire running from outer rail, to outer rail, so that both rails conducted power, and you did not have to rely on that "bent prong touching another bent prong" technology to insure you have a good gnd on both rails.
The "new" tab technology, does not afford the advantage of a large area to solder to, making the adding of wire a little bit more challenging. I show pictures of both styles of tab ends. I also have sections of straight, (I have not checked any curves) that have the older style on one end, AND the new style on the other end. I guess it was a transition period in MTH history.
None of this may be new to anyone, but I thought since it was new to me, I would point it out.
Thanks for reading, Greg Pict1 OLD STYLE - note the hot & gnd larger tabs Pict 2 NEW STYLE - NO tabs Pict 3 OLDER SOLDERED.
