railcraft:
-6 wood planks in the form of 12 slabs of wood
-4 bottles of creosote oil (a free byproduct of doubling coal or creating charcoal at no cost beyond the sand and clay for the coke oven)
-2.25 iron ingots and 2.25 coal in the form of 2 steel ingots used to make 6 rails in a rolling machine (6 to 16 ratio)
for 16 rails
recipe for vanilla:
-1 stick
-6 iron
for 16 rails
for the same amount of iron input, you get 2.66 times as much track. true you need some coal and extra wood, but I've never experienced a situation where I needed rails and could not come up with the creosote or with the fuel to make steel (which I use a lot of anyway). A coke oven is one of the first machines I make in railcraft, the value of double fuel in early game is great. You can save 25% of your creosote and easily automate by using a carpenter to make the rail ties as well.
I admit - traincraft has both vanilla and railcraft beat for the basic track recipe. 1 stick, 6 steel, 64 rails. Their steel is also substantially easier to make, using 1 clay, 8 coal and 24 iron to make 64 steel all without a blast furnace. I wish there were a way for a server to disable that recipe...
EDIT: hehe... even worse
using 6 steel and 1 stick to make 64 tracks with traincraft, you could then use the 8 track to 2 rails recipe of railcraft to receive 16 total standard rails without a rolling machine, then use the rails in railcraft recipes without mj req.