N gauge train

[kmcsjr]

Fred
welcome back to the hobby! I hope you find the hobby more interesting and fun than some of the thread responses. I Can't speak directly to your 80s vintage locos, but I can say, that when I started in N, 8 years ago, I boughy a few older locos and had a lot of work getting them to run quietly and smoothly. The newer Bachmann, Kato, Atlas, FVM, Fleischmann and a few other brands run really well. Spookshow.Net is a great reference, for what runs how.
I dont know your financial situation, but if it was me, Id buy a loop of eztrack, or unitrack to test the loco. Its the cheaper investment and will allow you to focus on the loco performance. From there, you can decide your next step

[skipgear]

Sorry to continue the thread drift but James is right, there has NEVER been brass track in N scale. Very old Nickle Silver will tarnish to a weak copper / gold patina and some claim that it is brass but it is not.

There has been steel track out there, again very rare and if you do run across it, please throw it away for the good of mankind. We have a module in our Ntrak club that somebody repaired with a piece of this mystical steel track and it is a constant dead spot on the module. We recently dead lined the module until that track gets replaced.

To the original poster - 35 year old N scale was still in it's infancy. If you like to tinker, play with it and get it running. If you are not interested in tinkering, buy new stuff and save yourself some headaches. Modern N scale run 1000 times better than the stuff of early days.

PS. Arnold Rapido track was blackened steel also.

[ACY]

When comparing a piece of known HO scale brass track to the track from my old model power n scale set, they are indistinguishable to the unaided eye which is why I thought it was brass. Thank you for the explanation and clarification.

[Hunt]

I decided to watch this thread for a while before correcting my typo as for me the rail material was not the point of my reply.  I intended the focus of my reply to be on the condition of the old track not the material used to make its rail.
   
Some may recall I use voice recognition software and sometimes it produces interesting and not accurate replies, like the time instead of spray, it used spay .

This time the word "not" was omitted. 

The rails are probably brass but whatever they are made of it is very likely there is significant corrosion especially inside of the rail joiners.  Unless you have a lot of track I suggest you start with new track with nickel silver rails.

Put together a small amount of your track and see how well a locomotive will run on it after properly cleaning the rails.

I intented to reply

The rails are probably not brass but whatever they are made of it is very likely there is significant corrosion especially inside of the rail joiners.  Unless you have a lot of track I suggest you start with new track with nickel silver rails.

Put together a small amount of your track and see how well a locomotive will run on it after properly cleaning the rails.

I normal apologize for my information errors but my reply provided the opportunity for some to display their historical knowledge and it gave sustenance to the gotcha folks.