After being hoiked out of a skip some 30 years ago by my Dad and being stored in his garage, I have some 65m of 8 core cable to strip for use on our model railway electrics. Once stripped the cable will provide me with 8 nicely coloured wires, red, black, orange, yellow, purple, green, brown and white, some cotton twine and some braided wire sheathing.

Originally there was 100m of this cable which had be wrongly bought for a building job and was skipped brand new! Me and my dad stripped 30m for the railway we built together when I was a teenager. Now in my 40s and being given the cable by my Dad after a bit of a clear out, I now get to strip the rest of it for use on my Son's layout, and probably the next few layouts after that

Uses, well the wire is obvious, anything needing wiring up on the layout and colour coded too

Cotton, not sure?

Wire sheath - could be used for main trees as it takes solder fairly well if I remember

One thing that I am not sure about is the wires capability to take current (max amps). It is 1.4mm OD with 7 wires strands each 0.2mm in Dia. Having had a scrape of a strand it looks like it is a copper core with a silver metal coating. We never had an issue back on the old DC layout 30 years ago, using the wire for all the track electrics, feeds, isolation breaks etc. But now for DCC, I am unsure. How can I test it / work out is capacity?