Track cleaning revisited

 The tl;dr version is this:

1. Mineral Spirits is the best bet for track cleaning fluid
2. An abrasive like a Bright Boy is said to be bad due to creating micro-abrasions, which can hurt conductivity as it causes gunk to build up.  But if you've neglected your track for 10+ years there may be zones where you need an abrasive material to get rid of rust or similar just to get it to work.

Starting up again I knew I was in for a major cleaning job.  I'd neglected the layout for 10 years, often it was used for storage so stuff got spilled.  It was all kinds of dirty.  I tested 3 types of cleaning fluid on 3 parallel tracks for a 12 foot distance.  I used several locomotives, all which had been opened out of the case for the first time and had newly installed decoders (and which had been confirmed to run well using a separate, fully clean, test track).

Mineral Spirits is recommended by many prominent model railroaders.   Denatured Alcohol is the main cleaning fluid that the Colorado Model Railroad Museum in Greeley, CO, uses.  (A great place - a future post about it is warranted.)  Isopropyl Alcohol was my mainstay since the 1970s - both 70% and 91% versions.

Well, the Isopropyl Alcohol lost the test badly.   Probably fine for a frequent light clean of an already clean track.  The other two both did great.  So, I started with the Denatured Alcohol because the CMRM has very smart people.  But they also have great ventilation.  I don't in winter.  The next day in that room my eyes watered badly and I had to air the place out despite the freezing temps.  So Denatured Alcohol was disqualified, leaving Mineral Spirits.  I may do Denatured Alcohol again in the summer when the windows are open.

Even after my first cleaning there were bad spots on the track and some track areas showed visible rust and just would not clean no matter how much scrubbing was done. The Bright Boy tool, something I bought decades ago but used rarely, followed by more cleaning with mineral spirits, solved most of the remaining cleaning problems.  But even then a new unexpected behavior occurred: Locomotives would run just fine over track but in some spots wouldn't notice DCC commands to, for example, stop moving or turn off lights.  More repeat cleaning would solve that, but I then had to retest all of the track I thought was clean to detect those DCC-fuzzy spots.