Building track has always fascinated me, and a few years ago I decided to try my hand at it. The methods I've found that I like are downloading Union Pacific's PDFs that they use for their real track, and then scaling it down to N scale and printing it out. If I want to make a curve, I can map it out in something like Adobe Illustrator, and then apply the UP specs to that curve and print it. I might have to cut the curve up into a few pieces to fit as much as possible on one sheet of paper, and then I'll cut them out and tape them together. Then I'll glue on copper ties every 5th tie, solder the rails, color it all black with an industrial sharpie, glue the wood ties to the paper, and then do some final painting and weathering. I'm also using code 40 rail, and trying to see how tight I can get my points and frogs and still have the turnouts be functional. I suppose I ought to have a Brittish fiNescale gauge or something, but I found if I just re-gauge all of my wheels so that they can wiggle back and forth in the gauge instead of the flanges being tight up against the inside, it works well. I also don't really want to compress my turn outs. I am compressing some curves, though. Right now I'm in the process of building my second #15 crossover. To start I took some google earth images of some real #15 crossovers near me. Then I took some photos of one up close. Finally I took UP's PDF specs for a #15 turnout, and copied and pasted it into a crossover. I think it's coming out okay, but I've seen some pretty amazing stuff out there!
I love my passenger trains, they do look nice on the bigger switches. I pretty much standardized on number 10 switches but I have a few mainline applications for number 12s.
I haven't seen any issues in my testing. Since I made the specs tighter, the part of the frog where the wheel is off the rail is only about 3/8" long. I also used strips of brass for the wing rails, which are slightly taller than the code 40 rail and also pretty tight, which helps with the long frogs too.
