What can be used to keep the rail from oxidation?

[armorsmith]

Roger,

Brass rail is drawn, not cast and Stainless Steel rail is rolled, not cast. That said, you are correct in the each of those processes have flaws in the process. Drawing brass rail involves pulling the billet of brass through a set of dies to develop the shape of the rail Highly controllable, but the dies do wear and can get flaws during the  process. Rolling involves feeding a bar of material into a series of opposing rollers that are stepped in configuration to generate the final rail cross section. As with the drawing process the rollers wear and can acquire flaws that will be transferred to the rail.

As for opinions, my grandfather always said, "Convince a man against his will, of the same opinion still." Obviously what you are doing is not working or you would not have asked for assistance here. It can be a difficult pill to swallow when the advice you receive is not inline with current thought processes. I find garden railroading to be very similar to 1:1 railroading, a real pain in the A$$. But then if I didn't want to do large scale I could always go back to On3.

Good luck and Happy Railroading.

Bob C.

[Chuck N]

One additional thing to consider.  There is a very small surface area where the wheel of the engine or lighted car is in contact with the rail head to pickup the current.  Any scratches in the rail regardless of depth or size will further minimize that contact area, this can lead to arcing and leaving deposits on the wheels and rail head.  It may be my imagination, but when I had scratches on the rail head, I think I was cleaning my wheels more frequently.

Chuck

As others have said, battery and RC is an option.  I have a couple of engines and rail cars that run on battery and RC.  I have the battery option so I can take trains to layouts that don't use track power.  One of my engines has the battery and electronics in the tender.  When the battery dies, I have to take the engine off the track and charge the battery.  I also have two battery cars.  If the battery dies, it is easy to swap out the batteries.  The battery in the tender is not easy to get to.  One of the battery cars is 1:29 for my AristoCraft Mallet and the other is 1:20.3 for my Bachmann K-27.  I also have an Accucraft Goose And a Delton Doozie with batteries.  The roof on the latter two comes off easily to exchange a charged battery for a dead one.

I prefer track power to battery, but I also recognize the sometimes battery might be better.

If the road dust is too bad to keep up with, battery may be your best option.

[AGSB]

There is a product out there called No-Ox that is getting positive reviews.

[nzreg]

I used NoOx on my on30 layout with very great success, my Bachmann DCC 0-4-2 Porter rarely made a full circuit with stopping several times.  After using NoOx following the instructions carefully I can now leave the Porter unattended for as long as I wish and it will still be running sweetly.
I understand that NoOx will work equally well on brass rail although it should be noted that the so called oxidation on brass rail actually aids conductivity.

[NarrowMinded]

My nephew was having an issue with a temp christmas layout, he lives on a busy street.
He mostly just lets the train run around, he likes to run it at scale speeds so once in a while it would stall, to help keep things running smooth we wired in some fairly large capacitors I had laying around and placed them in a stock car.

That pretty much cured his issue. Btw dc Not dcc.