22 pieces is 11 per side. Still need the measurements. Any increase in grade, especially when coupled with curvature, decreases load pulling ability. May have exacerbated the failure of the gear in your other engine.
If you cut the benchwork with a sabre saw, like cookie cutter method, drop the part that drops under the bridge by half the distance (let’s say you had six inches before, not the bridge is 3 inches above the old bench height), you have cut your grade in half. That will require more track…not a tight figure eight, but it will help you get there. Cut the top part
Dang … Just bought a bunch of 031 curve pieces. Maybe I can sell them before I permanently set up my lay out. I’m pretty sure I have enough room to go with a wider radius.
The gear on my other loco went out before I added the elevation. Not sure if I was trying to pull to many cars with it or it was just time for it to go. The one that is in it is brass. It seems all the new ones I see listed are plastic.
Amen to that! I have some plastic rods here that can give a pair of wire clippers a workout. I broke a small wire clipper on it. Snapped one of the jaws clean off. I put a cutoff disk on the Dremel and it went through it but it was still a tough go. I have no idea what kind of plastic it is. It’s very rigid and made a bunch of dust as it was being cut.
Do not divide the track into separately powered blocks to provide different voltages according to the grade.
A modern “transformer” may be designed to allow its outputs to be connected together safely. If so, it probably puts out the higher voltage if two are connected. This may burn out wiring in two-pickup lighted cars as the train crosses from a high-voltage block to a low-voltage block, when the lighted car tries to supply the locomotive ahead from the block behind through an internal wire between pickups that was intended only for the current of the car’s lamps. The same thing may happen using a single transformer and voltage-dropping elements, like rheostats or anti-parallel diodes.
Older, true transformers like your LW, will put out a fault current when the locomotive or any two-pickup car crosses a block gap. This is a worse situation than the more common level-track case, where the transformer voltages are intended to be the same, so that the fault current flows only by accident–on a grade, the point is to make the voltages different deliberately, guaranteeing a fault.
The worst case occurs when you use multiple outputs from the same transformer, in which case the fault current does not flow through the circuit breaker. It is limited only by wire resistance, can be very great, and will go on flowing until something burns up. See the warning on Lionel’s KW schematic.