Method & sourcing
How the figures on this site get made, checked, and kept honest.
Where the data comes from
Every fact on this site comes from a manufacturer's own current product page or category page — the kind of page you'd land on shopping for the track yourself. We don't transcribe by ear from forum posts or old reviews. Each value is stored with the exact source URL and the date we checked it, and both show up next to the value on the page.
This batch covers three HO/N scale track systems: Kato UNITRACK, Atlas True-Track, and Bachmann E-Z Track (Nickel Silver, gray-roadbed line). We picked these three because their own shop pages publish enough of the same kind of field — rail code, roadbed, joiner — to compare directly; see Known gaps on the track interchange page for what each one leaves out.
The DCC decoder sockets page is sourced from TCS's and SoundTraxx's own product pages: TCS's individual decoder product pages (its cross-brand "Find Your Decoder" chart is a client-rendered app whose data this batch couldn't fetch, so we used the server-rendered product pages instead) for socket types, current ratings and official WOWKit compatibility lists, and SoundTraxx's own factory-installed-decoders index and product pages for factory-install history and Drop-In boards. Digitrax was excluded from this batch: its Terms of Use limit use of its site content to personal, non-commercial use and prohibit public display or reproduction, which this public site can't satisfy.
Coupler cross-reference is not published yet. Micro-Trains already maintains its own official conversion table on its own site, and this batch only checked 3 of Micro-Trains' 14 brand groups — not enough to add anything an official source doesn't already cover, so no coupler page was built this round.
What "compatible" means here
The track interchange page checks one thing: whether two manufacturers publish the same rail-height ("Code") number for a given scale. If both publish it and it matches, the page marks it same rail code. If both publish it and it differs, the page marks it different rail code and says a transition piece would be needed — while also saying, honestly, when neither manufacturer publishes an official transition track for that pair, because that's a separate fact from the rail-height comparison. If either manufacturer hasn't published a Code number for that scale, the page marks the pair unknown and says so in words ("not published by the manufacturer") rather than guessing from a similar-looking line.
This comparison intentionally does not cover roadbed height, roadbed width, or power-feeder pin compatibility. None of the three manufacturers publish those measurements on their consumer product pages in this batch, so a real cross-brand fit could still depend on something this site doesn't check — that limitation is stated on the track interchange page, not hidden.
This logic lives in one file in the code (src/lib/compat.mjs), and every page that
shows a status pulls it from there rather than re-deciding it. The comparison is covered by tests
that deliberately break the logic to make sure the tests would actually catch a broken comparison,
not just a passing one.
What we won't do
- We don't quote a manufacturer's marketing copy or manual text. Every sentence on this site is written from scratch from the structured facts we pulled, and a build check scans every published page for long runs of text that match archived manufacturer copy, failing the build if it finds one.
- We don't reproduce official product photos, logos or diagrams.
- We don't publish a comparison page built from data we haven't sourced for the systems it covers. If a field isn't published by a manufacturer, the page says so instead of estimating it from a similar product.
- We don't sell anything on this site and outbound links to a manufacturer's own page are plain, un-tracked links.
Staying current
Manufacturers revise product pages without notice. Every fact on this site shows the date it was last checked, so a stale figure is visible as stale rather than presented as current forever.
Independence
This is an independent, unofficial reference project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated on behalf of Kato USA, Atlas, Bachmann, or any other manufacturer named on this site.