There are a few track brands for HO/1:64 slotties as well, and here again, I tried a few.
As I stated earlier, as a kid all my stuff was Tyco: my first racing set was a Tyco Pro around 1976. I can still remember leaving our apartment with my mom and dad and foolishly forgetting to unplug the power pack, only to return hours later to a room filled with smoke and a hole burned in the carpet!
In 1979 or 1980 I got one of those short-lived Matchbox sets, a really cool one where the cars could make sudden U-Turns with a nifty polarity reversal switch built into the controller, but those sets are more historical oddities now than anything. My last racing set, the Turbo Boost 300 that I got when I was 11 or 12 years old, was also a Tyco, a “Quik-Click” design much improved over the original Pro style. I still have this set today.
Since I started with Tyco sets and since there’s clear compatibility between the cars and tracks, it seemed logical-and cost effective-to continue that way, so once I started to outgrow my original Turbo Boost 300 set, I started buying bits of used Tyco track on ebay. I started slow at first, not wanting to bust the budget until I was sure this was what I wanted.
And in order to be sure, I bought a Life-Like set. It seemed OK, but I didn’t see much advantage over the Tyco brand, and I was non-plussed by the way the controllers were hard-soldered into the terminal track rather than attached with connectors. For a while, then, I had 2 tracks set up in my house, the Tyco Turbo Boost 300 on a table and the Life Like on the basement floor.
I bought several Tyco sets over the coming year, and am still racing on my favorite one. More details on that to come in a discussion on the merits of the Turbo Boost 300 speed control terminal.
By the summer, I would graduate to the Tomy AFX track. This is a story for later, as I am still working on this grand scale implementation. What I will say is that, in spite of using Tyco tracks almost exclusively for most of my life, I’m now sold on the superiority of the Tomy AFX design, but there’s still nothing wrong with a well maintained Tyco Quik-Click track if that is your preference.
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