My biggest problem with N back in the day was that most of the motive-power seemed to run (track) poorly. I had a dozen or so locos, all of them European or Asian imports (was there anything N-gauge made in this country back then?). Manufacturers/distributors ranged from Atlas to AHM (Lima), Bachmann, Life-Like, MRC, Rapido, and a few others. I think they were just too light to (1) pull a long string of cars and (2) run through points properly. A lot of tweaking of the trackwork was required to get things to at least move properly.

I've seen some of today's stuff running and it seems light-years ahead of where we were 40-50 years ago. A few years back I purchased a bunch of Kato's track that can be snapped together pretty easily; one of these days, maybe I'll set some of that up on the dining room table and see how things run (old trains on new track). Probably a dangerous thing to do.