What would you recomend, electro or insulafrog? I wan’t both tracks to be alive at all times preferably. Is the wiring complicated with one or the other. Please help me understand the difrence!
Lillen
Magnus, the electro-frog turnouts power the frog according to the route that the turnout permits. If I understand it correctly, you run the risk of shorts through the frog when your wheels and the turnouts are not nicely in gauge in all cases. In the case of insulfrog, the frog is a big gapped blob…no power to it. That means that there can be no shorts caused along the frog, so it is safer, theoretically, for DCC operations. Unfortunately, it also means that some locomotives may not be long enough, pickup wheel-wise, to straddle that length of unpowered track, and they will therefore stall…right on the frog. However, my tiny P2K 0-6-0 has no trouble on my Fast Tracks #8’s which are fairly lengthy turnouts. P2K did a good job of making the tender wheels and the drivers provide power to the decoder through pickups. As a result, even that tiny engine can run through the unpowered frog on my FT #8’s and not stutter or miss a turn of the wheel…not even any sound loss.
So, commercially, and handlaid using FT, I prefer the insulfrog.
I personally prefer Peco’s Electrofrog switches, for several reasons. They are more reliable electrically, with no problems losing contact on short-wheelbase locomotives. They are more realistic looking. The wiring is no more difficult that Walthers, Shinohara, or any of the other premium track makers.
Please note that the Insulfrog switches do not make both routes powered at all times. The only brand of track that does that is Atlas, to the best of my knowledge, and their Snap switches are NOT reliable over the long haul.
To wire an Electrofrog, or any other solid-frog turnout so that both routes are powered, even with the switch set against the route, is quite simple: put gaps in each of the rails coming out of the frog. Then run jumpers from the stock rails (the outside rails of the turnout) to the corresponding rails beyond the gaps. If you space the gaps out far enough, you can prevent a locomotive from derailing by running through the closed switch.
I have two turnouts that came as electro-frog. After several short circuits caused by metal wheels not hitting exactly right, I clipped the lead to the frog, thus making them insul-frog. I have 12 turnouts on my layout. Of that number 10 came as insul-frog and the other two have been changed to insul-frog. They shouldn’t be a problem unless you’re running locos with an extremely short wheelbase like a tiny 2 axle switcher or a 4 axle loco that picks up from one truck only. All my locos are all wheel pickup and all wheel drive.
Our club standardized on the insulfrog because of the ease of wiring, but we immediately started having stalling and short circuits problems. We switched to the electrofrog. I am personally also strongly in the electrofrog camp.
If you don’t want to deal with gaps and extrapower feeds then that means you want the insulfrogs.
Yes, with the electrofrog turnout the frog is metal all the way through. This means that the inside rail crosses the outside rail. If both of the rails coming from the frogs are dead ends then this is not a problem. Infact, in that case the track the turnout is pointing to will have power while the other direction will be electrically dead. The problem comes if power is fed into the turnout from the frog end (like putting the turnout in a loop). That will cause a short circuit, so one must use insulated rail joiners (or cut gaps) on that rail coming out of the frog. It us usually best to just insulate both rails coming from the frogs, and plan on adding feeders on the opposite side of the insulated joint.
An insulfrog has a plastic piece in the frog and wire jumpers on the under side, so one can just power the rail from the point end and it will power both tracks coming from the frogs. Easy, slap it in and run. The problem with insulated frogs is that there is a chunk of plastic that can cause a locomotive to loose power and stall on. The shorting problem with the insulfrogs comes from PECO trying to make this “stall zone” as small as possible. As such a metal RP-25 wheel can span the gap where the rails get close before the plastic part and short. Obviously if one runs plastic wheels this is not an issue.
The link bekow contains an excellent, accurate and easy to understand discussion of Peco Electrofrog switches:
I like the pictures with the red and green colored rails showing which are hot. It is so much easier to explain things with visual aids.
Lillen, in that link to Loy’s Toys description of electrofrog, read the very last statement at the bottom of the article. For me, that says all I need to know about electrofrog. [;)]
In N scale, I definitely vote for electrofrog. The wiring is not very complicated with DCC and tortoise machines. They allow for any of my engines to move at any speed over the turnouts without stall.