Ya USPS wants cash to get signed delivery, but it's a delivery confirmation so you get a receipt mailed to you. Yes great for high value items or business mailings. FedEx Ground still gets a autograph in my area, but Brown just drops stuff off and bolts. Our postal folks are pretty good about hanging around but then they know I am home 95% of the time. As far as packaging. I'd say that's a stretch to say that packaging was attempted. Wadded up newspaper stuffed down in each end would have worked wonders.
I would just cut the bad ends off as close to the damge as possible and use regular Atlas rail joiners on em. I dont think the tracks will seperate...they dont on flex track...
Truthfully I really believe that if they would have wrapped the track in newspaper, it would have made it. I’ve gotten small bundles of Code 55 flex track wrapped in newspaper where they laid out the paper so that it was longer than the track and made one wrap with each piece of track until the entire thing was in one nice bundle. Then they folded the ends to protect the track ends and put it into a box. Of course you can only do that with small number of pieces depending on what type of track it is. My 4 pieces could have easily been wrapped like that and withstood that tube being thrown from the street to my door. LOL Well this weird I thought I posted this the other day and when I just now came back to see mtntrainmans post it is still open. WOW!
Thanks, I've already planed on just cutting the bad end off because I just think its worth fixing. I still need 4 more tracks and since I don't want to pay the price of Bachmann Turnouts I will not need the plastic connector anyways as long as I can connect 2 pieces together for each of my 60" staging track.
It would take a considerable amount of force to do that kind of damage. Both to the rail, as well as the plastic roadbed. If the end of the mailing tube was not crushed, in any way, then I strongly suspect the track was damaged BEFORE it went into the tube. Meaning... defective ebay seller. (There... I said it.)
I have to agree, the damage looks very consistent with twisting damage that could only come from separating the sections very roughly. Notice how one piece is actually split right down the middle. I would confront the seller about this.
Either that or a dog got to them... But with ends damaged like that I'm shocked the plastic tabs didn't break off... Those are the first to go... As for separating the sections roughly, those tabs would have ripped off if that were the case. Trust me I use bmann ez track and I can stand on sections and the rails don't even roll like they used too.. But those tabs are still worthless lol.
unless you have a massive investment in Bachmann E-Z track, I would chalk this up as an unfortunate situation (contact the seller-this isn't shipping damage-it was disconected very roughly-one of the major disadvantages of Bachman E-Z track as a modular track concept) and purchase Kato Unitrack. Kato Unitrack has an significantly larger variety of track available and is supported much more heavily than the Bachmann product..the Kato track is a much more robust design, as it relates to disconnecting the pieces from each other (although not 'indestructible') Bruce
