befor i try this i would ike some feed back . i have a spool of phone wire and i would like to use it as my saply wire on my lay out . Q; is -would it carry the load or would i lose to much voltage. i planed on running it to about 3’ to 4’ on my lay out so that i have good voltage through out the track or am i better off useing a thicker gage wire
the lay out is n scale apx. 18’ long loop with a 22"r on each end
With a small layout like yours, telephone wire may be okay if you provide several feeders to the track; i.e., use 3 or 4 separate runs of wire to differrent points on your layout instead of only one wire. Branch out from your power pack to the different locations.
It would probably be okay. If the cable has 4 wires in it, you could double up on the wires, i.e. join the red and green together and join the black and yellow together. That would give it more current carrying capability.
i have a large DC HO scale layout (38x28) and i have had no problems with telephone wire. i stripped out a bunch of 50 wire cables and used the wire in color coded pairs. longest wire run is about 15’ from control panel to track. only single wire is the couple inches of drop from rail to the main feeder.
i use the common rail block system assigning power to each block through a rotary switch. the three power supplies feed each of seven control panels through 12 ga. wire and the grounding buss is a bare piece of 10 ga. copper wire that runs under the entire layout. any block over 6’ long gets extra drops.
i do not run more that 2 powered locomotives on any train and have no lighted passenger trains. i did load test the entire layout with 2 engines on a heavy train (50 cars) and found a maximum voltage drop of less that 1/2 volt in the most remote sections. that is not enough to cause any problems with straight dc operation and is not noticable so far as train speed is concerned.
i have each power source set to provide a max of 16 volts but seldom if ever run anything in “8th notch”
my telelphone cable came out of the old Big Four freight house in E St Louis years ago when they tore out the old phone system when the building was abandoned as a result of the PC merger.
a good source of wire is a metal recycler if there is one near you. those guys have miles of different sized copper wire and some of it is still on the original spool. they will sell it to you by the pound much cheaper than you can get it from the usual sources. if you go a little wild and buy too much, they will buy it back for about a buck a pound. those place also often have aluminum and copper tubes and shapes that make excellent flat car loads. use your imagination.
grizlump
you said rotary switch ? are you only powering 1 or 2 segments at a time
i use 3 position plus off rotaries make by carling. each switch controls one block. i have 3 power supplies that feed the control panels through an aristocraft te fm remote control. this way any block on the layout can be given to any one of the three remote controllers.
i tried to locate each of the panels that have the rotary switches near as possible to the blocks i want to control from a particular panel.
this way it is impossible to give a block to more than one controller at any time. works sort of like a track warrant system of dispatching. the rotary switches are the non shorting type (break before make) so i don’t get any unwanted power “blips” and the off position allows me to leave a train or engine sit dead in that block.
each engineer is responsible to see that the rotaries controlling the blocks he want to use are positioned properly for his next movement. that way one does not have to “roll the track up” behind you.
the engine terminal tracks are broken down into many “spots” and they are powered by on/off toggles downstream from the rotary switch for that particular block or track.
my staging area consists of 4 reversing loops and each of them is fed through a dpdt center off toggle downstream from the rotary. this of course means that a train must stop before leaving the reversing loops so i can flip the toggle and hit the reverse button on the hand held remote. that is not a problem since the staging tracks come out through an interlocking plant that has a stop board where trains re-enter the main line. this is not unprototypical and i worked in the E St Louis area where this was common at several locations where the plant was controlled by a block operator and/or switch tender.
probably more than you wanted to know but i am old and do tend to rattle on.
grizlump
its ok i dont mind the long text i thought about putting a reversing loop in but since it is just my self who runs my lay out i left it out but i might just put one in i dont know yet i want to see how it operats as is befor i put one in as soon as i sell my pool table ill have more room to build in and at that point ill put a staging yard in and will need to block off parts of the lay out. so all of the long text is given me much to think about thank you