Using the Helix spline I made 3 paraelle Helix shapes. The outer 2 were lofted with a circle to make the visable track. The center one was then joint via Animation Path Contraints with a sphere. This center track was then raised vertically to give the illusion of the ball sitting on the visable tracks.

Rendered at 24FPS and 100 frames long with high quaility mental ray and codec it took ~8miniutes to complete. I'm quite sure that wasn't as fast as my computer could do it as iTunes was running fine as it was going. When I move on to bigger stuff i'm going to allow rendering 100% CPU power.