Rail Racing - A Survival Guide

Here is a guide to rail racing. Having spent several months building the Gilbern Park Rail Racing Circuit I have a pretty fair idea of how rail racers behave and this is how to deal with them:

First, forget slot cars. These cars do not handle like slot cars, do not accelerate like slot cars and do not corner like slot cars. They are not anything to do with slot cars. Period.

Second, remember that these cars have tyres tall enough to give the Post Office tower a run for it's money in order that they can keep the gear above the rail. To use the word 'unstable' is to stetch the word to it's limits.

Third, this means the only way to keep the car on the track is to make it heavy. Very heavy. We haven't had to purchase a crane to move the cars on and off the track but we've been tempted a few times, and this means that when the car gets up to speed nothing short of collison with another car, or possibly a continent, will slow them down again.

Fourthly, if your car's guide hits the soldered joints it means that your car's pick up is too big and needs cutting down. It doesn't mean the track is the wrong shape and should not be attacked with a file.

Finally, if the car goes too slow around the corner it will stop because the body will not swing out enough to keep the guides on the side wire. If the car goes too fast it will plunge off the track, smash through the crash barrier and give the marshal serious pain.

However, once we've got past these minor points rail racing becomes as fun as slot racing. It takes a lot of skill to slide a car around a corner, especially on 'instant glasspaper' sandtex and if you get to the point where you can do it regularly you feel a real sense of achivement. You have a lot more leeway than with slot racing as everybody builds their own car from scratch, making the battle between different designs as much of a competition as the racing itself. The races are great fun, with far more action in a couple of laps of rail racing than in a couple of hundred laps with 'weld to the track' magnet slot cars. Rail racing is like taking a step back through time, to before rampant commercialisation homogenised slot racing to the point that a modern race consists of four clones sitting side by side on the starting grid. Rail racing is unspoilt, and long may it remain so.