Atlas Snap Switches are better than Tyco or other toy switches because they are made of nickle-silver instead of steel. On the other hand, if you inspect them closely, the design is identicle to the toy units. The guard rails are too wide. The switch relies entirely on contact between the points and the closure rail for electrical pick up. The smallest piece of dirt or corrosion between the point and the closure rails renders the switch dead until you get the locomotive past the frog. Atlas Custom Line has a metal frog that can be wired up to be live allowing the locomotive to only have to deal with dead points. Most locomotives will bridge the dead points and pick up power from the frog before they stall. The Custom Line still has the sheet metal points that tend to lay over with the weight of a locomotive and drop the locomotives into the gravel. The best switches are Micro-Engineeringor and B-K ,but M-E does not make anything smaller than a #6 switch, and B-K is so busy making O scale switch kits that he seldom has time for ho. The other choices are Walthers/Shinohara (code 83 Shinohara is marketed in this country as Walthers, code 100 is sold as Shinohara.) The Shinohara are pretty good. They have a brass slider bar under the points to give the points a second place to pick up power from. Unfortunately they are also a bit "fiddly" and the brass bar is sometimes hard to get to make a good contact. Probably the best choice is Peco, which has a spring to make the points make a good connection in whichever direction they go. Peco does not offer their switches identified by number however. They offer "shorts", "mediums", and "longs." The shorts are probably similar to #4s, mediums are probably similar to #6s, and longs are probably close to a #8, but if you lay them on top of actual 4s, 6s, and 8s there are differences.