My son and I got our layout put together last night. Everything went smoothly with no real problems. Kinda roughly laid in the switches for several of the turnouts so he could see how those are going to work. We had a lot of fun last night switching our train from track to track and backing it down the spurs. Gonna have to start working on the control setup now.

Just wanted to thank you guys for the encouragement in my other thread.

Here's the link to the layout...we built the second one down on the right.

http://www.thortrains.net/marx/funlayez1.html

I've got a couple of questions that are probably really simple. I did a search and didn't find anything so I'm gonna ask. Bear with me, I'm new to this.
I was looking at the the layouts at this page

http://www.thortrains.net/marx/kdlayhoa.html

I was going to attempt one of these so my 5 yr old would have something besides an oval. Thinking that the second one down is the one we want to try. In the materials list they reference Atlas True Track but I want to use EZ Track since we already have several pieces. Is the 30 degree curve the same as the EZ 18" curve? Can I substitute for the 1.5" pc or do I need to plan on cutting a pc of EZ track for that piece? Lastly, this won't require any tricky wiring will it?

I bought a small set, Thunderbolt, for my son and after about 6 hours of running the engine is running slower than it did at first. This started after the train derailed and was stuck for a bit. He had moved over to the slot cars and didn't put it back on the rails.I read about lubing the engine but wasn't sure if anything else might cause this.

The engine is an EMD GP40 Diesel.

Thanks