Ok Nefarius been playing and this is what I have come up with:
Your track texture needs four sides as your working in a box section not a plane like I did (and the AH tanks have)
So after you apply the UVW unwrap you need to select a face/poly click edit then planar map and move the vertex's onto the part of the texture you want.
rinse repeat until you are very bored.
I have done an example and I also forced 2 sided on the texture.
My Image is a TIFF with an alpha channel (cut out the bits you dont want) this is so you can just put the same image into the opacity channel and diffuse channel.
Also will someone please tell me how to post more than 1 image