Hi
I’ll be laying track in the not too distant future and I have DCC (NCE Pro)
OK, here’s the question…
As track is fed from the bus every 3 - 5 feet or so, is it best to leave connected flexi track lengths unsoldered or to solder them?
Cheers
Barry
[8D]
I only solder track together on the curves to keep them aligned. Keep your joiners nice and tight and you shouldn’t have a problem.
Ken.
Barry, the convention that I use is that every piece of track should have a direct solder connection to the power bus. Either the track section has a power drop, or it is solderd to a contiguous piece of track that does have a power bus solder connection. In this way you can avoid having any section that relies on a rail joiner for power. This may of course be overkill, but for the little effort to put in a power drop now I can save myself a ton of hurt if in the future a rail joiner connection fails to conduct well. I don’t solder connect my turnouts, so each gets power drops. I do tend to solder connect 2 flex track sections together. That 6’ section gets one pair of feeders. In this way, long runs of track have far less feeder density than complex areas of switches which might have many feeders. IMO the main goal of this is to ensure that there is a high quality electrical continuity to every section of the layout.
There are 4 different ways to assure that power gets to the rail under your locomotive:
The usual description of soldering a drop to each and every rail is gross overkill.
Jumpers can be unsoldered a lot more easily than rail joiners, and can also be installed around plastic joiners installed in the wrong place. Soldering jumpers is a lot less likely to overheat plastic ties than soldering joiners.
Soldering rail joiners is fine, if your layout is in a climate-controlled space. If, on the other hand, you’ve been forced to build in a space subject to both subfreezing and 100+ degree temperatures, restricting longitudinal rail movement isn’t a good idea.
Relying on the sliding contact of unsoldered rail joiners may work for a while, or even years, but when the contact fails it can be a bear to track down. If you want to hear some interesting language, say “Intermittent open circuit,” to an electrician.
As you may have deduced, my personal preference is for jumpers at all uninsulated rail joints. They take a little longer to install, but assure bulletproof power distribution.
Chuck
Chuck is spot on, in that jumpers provide an alternative method of ensuring a good conduction path from bus to every piece of track. What ever you choose, just avoid relying on a press fit rail joiner as the conduction path.
I don’t happen to use them, but then again my layout is in a cliamte controlled basement. Even so, every other peice has un soldered joiners, so there is still expansion and contraction wiggle room.
Chuck, what do you use as your jumpers? Are they easy to hide when ballasting etc? I’m curious as I think that they would work better for me on some complex switch installations that I have to do soon.
Something that works for me in N scale is I use many sets of terminal joiners (those are joiners with feeders already soldered to them). I space them every 2-3 track sections (regardless of the length of a section). I also solder ALL of my joints. I know, I know… I should be leaving expansion joints, right? I don’t expect my layout to be exposed to too much temperature change, and the door it’s built on has a 2" thick layer of Styrofoam that I’m hoping will buffer against any humidity changes. With the Digitrax system I’m using, it seemed that the few expansion (non-soldered) joints I did leave were still causing some current drops, so out came the soldering gun again… Now it operates flawlessly. Here’s hoping that since I’m building it out in the garage where temperatures are getting into the 80s, when it comes inside there should be even less pressure at the joints.
My terminal joiner feeders are roughly 22-24 AWG and drop (never more than 6") to 14 AWG solid bus wires, where the connections are again soldered. The only non-soldered parts of the whole track bus to train loop is between the locomotive and the rails! Also, no train is ever more than 2 rail segments from a feeder.
I like the terminal joiners because they have a little spade that sticks out at the level of the web of the rail which hides easily in ballast. Soldering wire to the side of the rail can leave a visual clue that “there’s a feeder wire here.” I suppose I could have made my own terminal joiners and soldered wire to the underside of a standard joiner and saved money… but then again, hindsight’s 20/20!
Yep, I’ve got 14 and 22 AWG. I think it’s a run between if you need to allowi for expansion and contraction then leave unsoldered but run a feed to each length. However, If the place is temperature stable, then solder up, but feed at longer lengths.
Well, my layout is being built in the loft (very British place to have a railroad don’t you know) so I’m looking at air con and heating to keep the temperature OK.
Thanks Chuck, thanks Simon.
SORRY!!! Thanks Ken, thanks Dave.
[#ditto]
I basically plan on doing as Simon discussed. I plan on doing my layout in my basement (Ohio), and though I have a humidifier in my furnace for the winter and a dehumidifier for the summer, I am concerned about wood expansion/contraction, therefore my plan is:
Solder joiners on curves only.
No solder on straight joiners.
Feeders to every flex-track section.
Jim
simon1966
The jumpers I use are pieces of bare, tinned #22 (I think) solid wire, salvaged from old telephone installations that were redone in the '60’s. Where they aren’t objectionable (hidden staging, and inside tunnels) I leave the omega-shapes exposed. On visible track that isn’t supposed to be used by my catenary motors I run them down through holes in the roadbed and sub-roadbed, something like a double-ended drop. Where the prototype would have used heavy jumpers I leave them visible, but paint them the same grunge color as the sides of the rails in the same area.
Chuck
I use the solder rule. I solder all rail joints then cut my gaps for block control. I’m going to keep using block control even after I’ve gon eto DCC, primarily for short protection and trouble shooting, but also so I can store DC locos on sidings and not worry about them overheating since I can just turn their section of track off.
I solder all of my joints and have had no kinks in my 2800 feet of track. It has been down now for 5 years and if I were to have problems they should have showed up by now!
I use is 7/16 OSB (Orientated Strand Board) for my subroadbed. Now I know that this just goes against the norms but then again I have had no problems. I also use Homasote on top of the OSB and then use cork under most of the mainlines and passing sidings.
The OSB is painted on the top and sides with the moisture barrier on the bottom. The Homasote is also painted. Now why don’t I have the normal problems that others are having?
Could it be the OSB (due to the large wood chips with the grain set at many different angles? Maybe it expands in all directions and now just one as with dimensional lumber.
But the main thing to remember is that it is working. I run a dehumidifier in the summer and try to keep the humidity below 70% and in the winter I try and keep it higher than 50%.
I also put track drop wires for every section of flex track and on all 3 ends of every turnout. It is amazing as I have no engine stalling on my turnouts and all of them are dead frogs.
BOB H – Clarion, PA
Oh, yes, I forgot to mention too… I painted both sides of the door my layout is built on. It seals primarily against warpage, but also I imagine it might help reduce uptake of water vapor due to high humidity or, conversly, drying out.
On my layout (in an unfinished basement in northeast Ohio with a dehumidifier), every rail joiner was jumpered. Feeder wires from the DCC bus were attached to the rails about every 6-8 feet. The only times I soldered the rail joiners were if I had a short piece of rail and jumpering to it would have been overkill. Otherwise, I laid my track leaving a .010" or .015" gap at all of the rail joiners to allow for expansion and contraction.
While jumpering all of the rail joiners sounds like overkill, I have not had any problems with my DCC locomotives losing power or the DCC signal. Before attaching the track wiring to the DCC command station, we actually hooked up the wiring to a 12 volt power supply and went around shorting the rails at different points and taking resistance readings everywhere to make identify any places with low voltage where we might be missing a jumper or need additional feeders. Yes, that may seem obsessive, but I have a former electrical engineer as part of my work crew. [:D]
Jerry
Just wondering,
Why does some people rail joiners jumper? With the same working time spent, every piece of track could have a direct solder connection to the power bus. That would omit the measurable voltage drop in the rails because the conductivity of copper (in the power bus) is better then the conductivity of nickel silver in the rails.
Rene.
Rene Luethi and others
I was wondering the same thing. It is amazing the ways and trouble that modelers go to, it seems, to try and be different and usually spend so much more time than it is worth to end up with a lesser quality job and then complain about how poorly everything runs. Well actually they do not realize how poorly it runs as they never run on a lot of other model layouts!
People, this is not rocket science here it is plain old common sense. Nickel Silver track has more resistance per foot than copper does. So keeping the full voltage to the engines is a must. Now most of the time we can not see any difference but to electronics it can be the difference between good running and poor running.
Not all components are the same and with the thousands of them being made tolerances will stack up on the good side and also will stack up on the bad side. If we get one of the bad sets of tolerances then the decoder will not want to work right, lose its memory and a host of other things. Then we blame the mfg. for making a poor product. NO folks it is the way it is in and mfg. environment just like it is in cars. We all have had a bad one in our lifetimes just as we have had a really good one!
So to keep the problems to a minimum no one should ever rely on the nickel-silver track to carry any more power to the engines than necessary. Every 3 feet is the best way to keep the problems to a minimum. This is how I built my ZERO maintenance layout and with 2800 feet of track and over 150 turnouts I do not have to spend any time working on maintenance. The layout always runs every time I turn on the power, period!
Now I have visited a lot of other layouts and when a large crowd shows up (and this is the owner of the layout and one other person) the layout begins to have problems. The engines either quit running or run erratically or the keypads won’t control the engines, they run away or won’t run at all. The owner stands around and states
Hi Rene,
I used to live just outside of Geneva and have good friends and my wife’s half brother living in Zurich and a really good friend in Luzern. As a child, I remember visiting a really nice public layout in Rapeswill (SP?) just down the lake from Zurich I wonder if it is still there?
Anyway. I do agree that it is not much extra effort to run some extra feeders to ensure life long reliability. My longest run between feeders is where I have feeders roughly in the middle of two 3 foot sections of flex track soldered together. I am comfortable with that and never had the slightest problem with running in these areas.
Bob, I hear your passion. If I understand you correctly, you are running pairs of feeders off the ends of all 3 routes in a turnout? Since the outer diverging rails are only a few inches long, what is wrong with a pair on the outer rails of the turnout and then a pair on the short inner diverging rails. I can’t see that having 2 feeders either end of an 8" max piece of rail will make much difference compared to 1 feeder in the middle?
Ditto Simon. When I laid my track I ended up adding more power drops that was necessary. But that’s OK. If I ever have a problem with a track joiner it will be easy to just add the extra power drops to the main bus
Everyone claims that the Atlas turnouts will give trouble down the road. Our Club had problems after 5 years or so with parts of the Atlas turnout going dead in the middle of the turnout. I had to run a jumper wire across the turnout to get the section to work again. Now this layout was set up originally for DC block control and had insulators on the ends of the turnouts, so they were not getting power from the adjoining track.
When I decided to build my new home layout I did not want to have this problem in the future and decided right from the beginning to feed all ends of the turnout to eliminate any possibility of losing power.
Now I am the first to admit that this is way overkill! BUT I am not going to have problems down the road. And if a percentage of these wire drops develop problems in the future I will have hopefully compensated for the problem by overbuilding my layout.
Remember the key word here is ZERO maintenance. And this layout is a long term project and with over 2200 sq ft of layout to build (by myself) I don’t want to have to go back and keep redoing previous years work.
From the number of layouts I have operated on over the past 20 years, I am beginning to believe that most layout owners only feel that these layouts are temporary as they cob them together just to get them running and rip them down the following year and start again. I, on the other hand, know what I want and it is a layout that runs the best I can get it to run. When I have a 12 hour OPs session I always ask the operators if they had any problems and where they had them and when. I then take the time to investigate each and every reported problem to find out if it was a layout, wiring, DCC or operator problem.
This is what I am doing now with my radio DCC system. I am trying to eliminate the radio dead spots as much as I can and probably have more miles and time moving the radio receivers around then most people have in running their layout. Why? Beca