Wire Gauge

For short runs,18 inches or less,18 gauge stranded is fine. This is easy to work with and solder.  This should be connected to a heavier gauge bus. The bus size depends on how long it is and how much current runs through it. For small layouts,#16,or #14 is fine. For larger layouts,#12 or #10 is a good bus size. Desirable bus size can be calculated and should not be confused with appropriate bust size which is subjective and is a completely different topic.

Dale H

the best advice on choosing what wire to use would depend on the answer to a few questions about your layout.  what is the size of the layout you ultimately envision, that is, are you wiring up a 4' x 8' or smaller board or will it be a 10' x 20' or larger room?  also, what do run?  small (3-5 car) postwar trains or 4x coupled, modern sound system diesels with long freight consists or 10x lighted cars?

it's easy to give you worst case wiring advice with huge buswire backbones, but if you're like me who rarely draws >2 amps on a small loop of track, there is no need to supersize.

cheers...gary

I am thinking a loop of 072 track and a a few straights to make an oval, just to get me going with GarGraves track. I don't double head engines, except for my Santa Fe black bonnets Lionel made a few years ago, but that only has one powered unit. I usually run Legacy, with an occasional postwar piece.

Hope this information helps.

Sounds like you will have a similar layout and size to mine, but I am using Atlas track.

FWIW, I currently have a 6'x16' table with 2 separate loops of track, joined with crossovers, but isolated. I used OGR wire, wired for DCS with #14 wire to terminal blocks then #16 to the track feeds. I have 4 blocks per loop with one feed per block.

It all works very well, no problems. This is probably overkill for the current setup, but expansion was planned from the start so I wanted to be ready for that without having to redo too much for the expansion.