Best HO Scale Flex Track

Use code 83 unless you have a specific reason not to. Code 100, at 0.100 inches tall, was the HO standard for decades and it is still the rail most starter sets from that era were built around, along with a lot of older Athearn blue box and Life-Like equipment that has deeper wheel flanges than current NMRA-compliant wheelsets. That extra rail height gives those flanges more clearance and fewer derailments.

Code 83, at 0.083 inches, looks closer to the 2.5 to 3 inch tall rail a real railroad actually runs, and it is the size current production equipment from Athearn, Walthers, Bachmann and Kato is designed around. If your roster is built after roughly the 1990s, or you are buying new equipment as you go, code 83 is the better long term choice and it is what most published track plans now assume.

A transition track section exists specifically for the layout that has both: an older code 100 yard being extended in code 83, for example. It is a cleaner solution than filing a joint by hand.

Buy one piece first if you have never laid flex track before. A 4 by 8 foot layout with broad curves typically needs somewhere from 12 to 20 three foot lengths depending on the plan, which makes a 25 piece carton the better per-foot price once you know the plan is final.

No, not on their own, and this is the mistake that shows up two or three years into a layout rather than on day one. A rail joiner is a mechanical friction fit between two lengths of rail. It is not a soldered electrical connection, and friction fits corrode, loosen with seasonal humidity changes in the layout room, and work slightly apart under normal expansion and contraction. A layout that depends on rail joiners alone to carry power from one section to the next develops dead sections as it ages, usually starting at the joint farthest from the power feed.

The fix is to solder a feeder wire to the rail every three to six feet and run those feeders to a bus wire underneath the benchwork, rather than trusting the joiners to relay current down the line. Atlas Code 100/83 Nickel Silver Universal Rail Joiners 48 Pieces HO Scale are still necessary hardware, since every piece of flex track needs joiners at both ends, but treat them as a mechanical splice and nothing more. Peco SL-110 HO Code 75 Rail Joiners 24 Pack are worth keeping separate from a standard Atlas assortment if you are working in Peco's finer code 75 or code 83 rail, since mixing joiner sizes across brands is a common cause of a kink at the join.