What is in this set again?

@anthony_davies:
16 plastic rails (16 studs long)
16 plastic ties (2x8 w/ clips to seat the rails)

You can make 40" of straight track with it.

@PurpleDave said:
" @anthony_davies:
16 plastic rails (16 studs long)
16 plastic ties (2x8 w/ clips to seat the rails)

You can make 40" of straight track with it."

So the ‘8 strait rails’ set has 16 strait rails. Makes sense.

@anthony_davies:
By 9v and later standards, it makes eight straights. Each of those straights uses two rails.

Where it gets odd is that it has half as many ties as they've been using on 9V and later track. I figure that's because from 9v on, they've been molding the track as a single piece incorporating both rails, so more ties provides necessary strength to keep them from breaking. With older track, you had to attach the rails yourself, so less ties makes the set less expensive.

@PurpleDave said:
"I remember when I got this as a kid. It was my first LEGO set, and I used to play with it for hours on end. Good times..."

How did you play with tracks alone?

I still have quite a bit of these rails, but the connectors between 2x8 and the rails became very brittle over the years (They are not studs). They break so easily that they are practically unusable.

I found a few shrinkwrapped boxes of these in a Boston-area store in 1996. That store was amazing and had a ton of new old stock. I cleaned them out. :)

Still waiting for the Trains fans to come explain the lore behind this set

@Zackula:
I'm actually not, but I'll give it a try anyways. Way back in the day, they had super clunky 4.5v trains that looked like they were designed by grade-schoolers (I mean, the parts palette was pretty anemic in those days, so this wasn't surprising). The problem with trains is they can only drive where there's track, and you didn't get a lot of track included with each train, so...track packs.

And I just realized that if you get four sets of matched radiuses, and you space the tracks correctly, you could actually operate a third train in the gap _between_ two sets of track. Of course, my LUG sets the lines so they're 8 studs apart, and centered if you put them on half-baseplates, so we'd have to make some major changes to pull this off. Still...

Never had this set as a kid, I only had the 7851 Curved track equivalent.

Not huge amounts of play possibilities with just a semi circle of track - I really should have got more.

But I’ve made up for it in my AFOL years, I’ve got boxes of it now!

@anthony_davies said:
" @PurpleDave said:
" @anthony_davies:
16 plastic rails (16 studs long)
16 plastic ties (2x8 w/ clips to seat the rails)

You can make 40" of straight track with it."

So the ‘8 strait rails’ set has 16 strait rails. Makes sense.
"

They should have said: "8 straight rail sections". As a kid, after saving, we bought these to replace the blue rails we used for the 12V trains. This was much sturdier. Unfortunately after all the years the clips often break.

One thing is true for sure, Huwbot is really really random in his choice. :)

@PurpleDave said:
" @beanjo68:
I was kidding. I've never owned any of those tracks. There's pretty much nothing interesting you can do with those parts alone, especially since the ties aren't regular 2x8 plates. But I did manage to get a solid two hours of fun out of it before someone made me explain, and thus ruin, the joke."

That's why you shouldn't explain jokes. Anyways, I DID get two of these sets as a kid and had a lot of fun, playing with them for hours. Would have been better if I had even more of them, though....

You had to buy this set plus 7854 conductor rails to get 8 sections of straight 12v track. I remember being very pleased when I added it to my new 7740 set!

Beautiful!

Like @Lego_lord and @Wrecknbuild already stated, the clips that hold the rails in place are really brittle but also really tight. This causes them to crack very easily if they’re taken apart without enough caution. You can manage to seperate them without breaking anything, but you have to do it veeeery slowly and carefully. My dad has a lot of these rails and some of the older blue ones as well (along with those electric bits that go in between the rails, to make the train drive) and when I take those out to build a train track, I always use as many of the blue rails as I can before continuing with the grey ones even though those connections barely have any clutch power left. They basically only stay together due to gravity, but that’s not a big deal when just making a flat train track and I much prefer that over the risk of breaking more and more old pieces. Luckily though, if only one of the teeth on the connectors that hold the gray rails is broken, the rails will still stay in place fine and connect in a similar fashion to how the aged blue ones do.

The grey track were a large improvement on the blue rails which had little clutch power just a square hole at the end of the rail, and kept coming apart especially around the corners. However, you could use the blue straight rails as beams in vertical and horizontal construction, which was not so easy with these rails as didn't connect to standard plates. Interesting that the original blue rails are still used as gantry crane rails as in 60052.

I only added another 4 of these to my inventory on Thursday! Amazing what you find when you clean, organise and catalogue. After 40 years or so of sitting in a box I had to be rather gentle and delicate in separating the sleepers from the rails... there's definitely a technique to it! Subtle flexing and bending of the sleeper seemed to work so as not to break the tie.

@chris38911 said:
"You had to buy this set plus 7854 conductor rails to get 8 sections of straight 12v track. I remember being very pleased when I added it to my new 7740 set!
"

Santa was really good to me in 1980... as a 7 year old, making sure 7740 was a 12V beast, buzzing around the lounge room floor on more than just an oval track ;-)

I just broke one of those plates when assembling a set. Almost every 12V train set has I found had a lot of those broken, luckily I've a few spares. I don't think I'll ever try to make a circuit with these.
This is probably the most common part in my broken parts box (yeah, I keep my broken parts). Well, if we don't count the plates with theet marks, but those aren't "broken", strictly speaking...

If you want to run those old trains, you can use a 9V motor or you can put the center plate with the 12V electrical strip on modern tracks.

I briefly read "Grey" as "Gay"... p amusing considering they're "Straight" Rails... :P

This was a life saver as my https://brickset.com/sets/7715-1/Push-Along-Passenger-Steam-Train did not have any straight rails, so I had no place to put my https://brickset.com/sets/7835-1/Road-Crossing

@AustinPowers:
It's already mortally wounded and gasping its last breaths on the ground, so I might as well finish it off and bury it. The implication was that this was the only set I owned at the time, and that I was still finding ways to play with it. Alone, with no other parts besides what comes in this set, there's very little you can do besides make eight sections of train track.

@PurpleDave said:
" @AustinPowers:
It's already mortally wounded and gasping its last breaths on the ground, so I might as well finish it off and bury it. The implication was that this was the only set I owned at the time, and that I was still finding ways to play with it. Alone, with no other parts besides what comes in this set, there's very little you can do besides make eight sections of train track."

Well, considering what the set is supposed to be I find it does its job quite nicely. And I for one am happy to have found so many good uses for those rails even when not using them as intended.