About RailCompat

Ask whether a piece of Kato track will actually join up with an Atlas or Bachmann piece and you'll mostly land on a forum thread full of "worked fine for me" replies from people running different production runs, different years, different everything. The manufacturers themselves rarely put the answer on one page. RailCompat pulls the answer out of what each maker has actually published — a cited, dated figure behind every claim — and where a maker just hasn't put a number out there, the site says that in plain words rather than filling the hole with a guess.

Two comparisons are live right now. One lines up Kato UNITRACK, Atlas True-Track and Bachmann E-Z Track on the rail-height number each brand calls its "Code," alongside whatever official transition-track piece each maker sells for crossing brands or crossing its own Codes. The other maps DCC decoder sockets: which socket standard goes with which locomotive brand, TCS's and SoundTraxx's own listed WOWKit and factory-installed decoder records, plus a set of individual locomotive models pulled straight from each model's own product page.

Coupler cross-reference is missing on purpose, not by oversight. Micro-Trains runs its own official conversion table already, and our own check only reached 3 of its 14 brand groups — nowhere near enough to beat what Micro-Trains already publishes. Nothing goes live here until it's actually built out of sourced numbers for every system a comparison claims to cover and it adds something the official pages don't already say; a thin placeholder page isn't the standard.

The sourcing and comparison rules are spelled out on the method page.

RailCompat isn't run by, paid by, or speaking for Kato USA, Atlas, Bachmann or any other brand it names — it's an independent side project and nothing here is for sale. Spot something off? Write to hello@railcompat.com.