Lego tracks had many colours during the years. 

The first color was BLUE, for both 4,5 V and 12 V systems. This is the Blue Era (1966 - 1979) and with those tracks were released many sets, like 080, 113, 116, 723, 727 (the whole list is longer...)

Than, somebody in the Lego factory said "but who has ever seen a blue track?". So from the 1980 the colour changed, but not the mold. The new colour was GRAY, much similar to the rail steel. With the "new" colour Lego released the most famous set (like 7740, 7745 and 7750).

But the 12 V system was not so easy to handle (in particular for the children): each track section was made by 5 or 6 parts: 2 gray tracks, 3 dark gray track sleepers and the 3rd track if you wanted use 12 V motors (and no battery boxes). Build a great train display with meters of traks needed a lot of time. So the Lego company, during the late 80es studied a new track system with a new voltage. After a long study, they decided to make each track made of only one part and to eliminate the 3rd rail. In this way, the electric current would be taken direct from the 2 rails that would have a metallic part. This was, probably, the first step into "juniorization".

This is one of the molding proof for the 9V track system. Why is it red? Lego usually makes its prototype with the red granulate because the red color is the hardest color to mold. Each new mould has to be proof due to the very high quality standard of the LEGO factory. As you can see, here there is only the ABS part and not the metallic rails. The metallic rails are added later in the ordinary tracks.

This part was molded in the early 90es (probably between 1990 and 1992) and up today, never shown on internet. There are only three other molding proofs shown in internet, one is the red ghost (picture comes from BrickLink.com). , the second one is the red castel helmet (picture comes from Brickshelf.com) and the last one the green helmet castle with neck protector (picture comes from the same gallery of the red helmet). Last 7th Oct 2006 two red LEGO trees (prototypes too) were sold on eBay.nl. The number of "lost" molding proofs by LEGO Group is rising a lot during the last period ;-)

(picture by Johannes "Jojo" Koehler)

This is not a "mottled" brick/plate (see this page to know more about them), because there isn't any reason to change the colour of the track. Lego produced it only with the dark gray granulate (before they make it with the new dark bluish gray). Other colours (except this test) were never used!

The mould was satisfying, so Lego was able to produce the new tracks, that you know very good!

How did I get this track section? This is a long story that I will not tell you in this page at this moment. ;-)

From the year 2006, LEGO began to sell new tracks for the new RC battery trains. They are without metallic rail, cost less (about 50% less) but are a little bit different from the 9V tracks because there aren't any hole for the attachment of the metallic part.

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