Painting Rail
I used to spray-paint rail, but now I just hand paint it with Floquil's Rail Brown. It dries faster than regular spray-paint cans, and it gives me more control. I also like the color (once dried) better than what I was using before. I paint the rail before installing it on the layout. That makes it easier. The photo below is an extreme close-up.



Electrical Connections
My philosophy is that each and every piece of rail needs to have a feeder wire attached to it. This is especially important for the way I install track because I do not use rail joiners when I handlay code 40 track. In essence, each rail is isolated from any other.

I mark off on the rail and on the roadbed (typically a mark in between the ties on the ballast) where the feeder wire is to go. All my wires are soldered to the bottom of the rail so that they are hardly noticable. The next step is to drill a hole in the roadbed. I dril a hole just one drill bit size bigger than required by the feeder wire I use. This allows for some fine tuning of the track.

I have found the easiest way to attach the wire to the rail is to first insert the wire in the pre-drilled hole. The wire and the bottom of the rail are pre-tinned. I hold the rail in my fingers and hold it steadily on top of the bent wire. Applying the hot soldering iron is all that is necessary to connect the two parts (see photo below).

The photo on the right shows how I cut a small section out of the nearest tie to accommodate the bent part of the feeder wire. By doing this the rail bottom will lay smoothly on the tops of the ties. Although slightly out-of-focus, the close-up photo below shows the wire attached to the rail. You can hardly tell that it is there.

Placing Rail
The advantage of handlaying rail and building it on the layout itself (as opposed to building it on the workbench and moving it to the layout), is that you can use full lengths of the rail. This photo shows one full length rail already glued in place. I am getting ready to install the second full length rail. The third, shorter piece of rail is temporarily used to make sure the wooden blocks are holding the long rail in the right location relative to the ties. As you can see, I am laying the rail right through a turnout. Needless to say, the rail has to be filed down at the right places to accommodate the turnout's points later on. Using full-length rail does require some pre-planning.



Gluing Rail
I started using superglue to attach the rails to the ties, but I found that a lot of times excess glue winds up on top of the rail head. This stuff is hard to scrape off. Also, it tends to leave a shiny surface on the ties. The second long piece of rail shown in the photo above was attached with 5-minute epoxy. It gives me time to adjust the rail, while still being able to be done with the rail in a few minutes. This is now my standard way of laying rail. I have only had a few pieces come loose at one end. They are easy to fix by simply re-gluing the loose part. If worse comes to worse, you can always cut a piece of rail out, clean-up the ties and ballast, and place a new piece of rail.

Testing
As I lay the rail, I always use the NMRA track gage (shown below). When the gauge tells me everything is OK, I also run several freight cars (different brands), a passenger car, and a couple of locomotives across the track.