I recently purchased a Broadway-Limited AC6000 and am having problems with it stalling on my #6 Atlas turn-outs. I have cleaned the switch and also the wheels on the loco but nothing seems to help. No other engine that I have does this an any of my turn-outs. Any info would be greatly appreciated.
Are the frogs powered? Are the wheels in guage and not touching other rails and shorting out the loco? Have you checked all of the electrical connections in the loco to make sure that power from both rails is being picked up over the broadest distance possibe? Have you checked that all of those connections are good? Are any of the wheels lifting and therefore breaking contact with the rails causing power not flow? Those would be the things that immediately come to mind.
I am having the same problem with a K-4 Pacific. I have discovered that it is not drawing power on the left side of the loco, just the tender. The front truck on the tender picks up power from the left hand side and the rear truck picks up on the right side. When the front truck is over the insulated frog, there is no left side pick electrical pick up. I am guessing there is a loose wire inside the loco but I haven’t had the time to open it up.
Does you AC6000 only stall when either the left or right wheels is over the frog or does it stall if either side is over the frog. If it only stalls on one side, you are halfway there. Then you have to determine if it is the front or rear truck that has the problem. Put the loco on a regular section of track. Set the throttle to zero and turn on the bell. Raise on end just enough so those wheels are off the track. If the bell shuts off when the rear wheels are off the track, you aren’t drawing power from the front and vice-versa. Once you determine which end is not drawing power, you can decide to open it up and fix it yourself or send it back to BLI and hope to get it back in a month.
Most #6 turnouts need to be powered at the frog. What type of swtch is it.
You only need to power the frogs if you have engines that only pick up power from one set of wheels. If you get power from both front and rear wheels, one set will continue to draw current while the other set is over the insulated frog. I suspect baron9 has encountered the same problem I have in that one set of wheels was not properly wired so it does not pick up power when the other set of wheels is on the frog.
If you have the older Atlas turnouts, they were notorious for poor electrical continuity through the rivets that held the point rails in place. I have wound up soldering short jumper wires between the outer and point rails near the rivets on most of the Atlas turnouts on our club layout (HO scale) because of this problem.
I struggled with this same problem before discovering the problem. The problem for me wasn’t the insulated frogs but it was what I kept looking at. For me it was vertical movement of the trucks going through the switch. I glue my track down over Woodand scenics foam. I found that when the locomotives would go through the turnouts, the trucks would move lsightly in the vrtical direction and that would cause them to stall. Just the sound units, not regular units. Getting a square and lating it along the rail top and then tacking the track down, especially at the frog, solved the problem. This has been repeated one a number of problem turnouts.