Does it matter what materials the rails are made of? Sometimes I’ll see a saddle with ti rails alot cheaper than one with cro – mo … The Chromag Trail master Ltd according to distributor is unavailable for a while – I do think leather is a nice material for a saddle…
Rails usualy go from solid Cr-Mo, to hollow Cr-Mo, other various steel alloys like Vanadium Trioxide, then Ti, then carbon. The shells on cheep saddles are injection moulded reinforced plastic, then more expensive ones will have increacing ammounts of carbon or other fibres to lighten/stiffen/make springy.
Ti is usualy lighter and flexes more which gives the saddle more ‘spring’. Gilding the lilly though, or making a purse form a sows ear. If the saddle isn’t comfortable it won’t improve it.
If you’re picking saddles without trying them then there’s a few things you can guess at. Width, usual 130 or 145 or sometimes wider, has no relation to how wide your hips are, but how wide the bones you sit on are, some shops can measure this, otherwise just buy a few saddles and try them back to back on the road, after a few miles the wrong width ones become fairly obvious. Some saddles swoop up at the back, some dont, generaly MTB saddles are better flat. The cut out in the middle is determined by how rotated your pelvis is (mainly due to short hip flexors from too much cycling and not enough stretching), more rotation means bigger cutouts as essentialy it moves your junk further back/down.