I see a whole lot more soldering in my future than I ever imagined when I started down this road…[:)]
If you haven’t seen my other posts, I have several Atlas turnouts (second hand), and most of them seem to have failed at the pivot point. That is, I don’t have a flow of electrons from the stock rail to the corresponding frog rail. From what I’ve read, even new switches are expected to fail at some point, so precautions need to be taken before laying track.
Question - if the frog rails are live, but the point rails are dead, things should still work because one truck will always be on live rails, correct?
Assuming that’s the case (and it is, from a little experiment I just ran), it seems I have two options:
run a pair of feeders to the frog rails on all turnouts
run a pair of jumper wires from stock rails to corresponding frog rails on all turnouts
Are those my only options? If so, is one preferable to the other?
On the Atlas turnouts, the power to the point rails is expected to flow through the rivets at the pivot for the points. Depending on how old these turnouts are, they may have a metal frog that is electrically isolated from the other rails. If the section you’re talking about being dead is the stationary rail between the frog and the rivet for the points, you probably will need to run a wire to feed them. You can do this on the bench before installing them if you intend to use these old turnouts. If they’re older than that, they may have a plastic frog with the metal rails coming close together in the black plastic. These are the ones that are not considered to be DCC friendly because you can get an instantaneous short as a metal wheel passes over the frog.
If the metal frog itself is the area that’s dead, the newer ones are designed this way. If you need this powered for short wheelbase locomotives, Atlas makes a Snap Relay for powering this up, and they come with a rather large instruction sheet for installing and hooking it up.
I wouldn’t recommend ignoring the problem and expecting the power pickup on your locomotives to bridge a dead spot. Murphy is alve, well, and very busy enforcing his law on most layouts, so things can (and will) always get worse.
Let me be more explicit in my question - if the point rail(s) is dead because the pivot point is worn out, but the frog and closure rails are live, should things work ok? I did a bench test with just such a switch, and the loco got through the turnout just fine.
If the point rails are dead, you can solder a thin wire across the pivoting section of the point to the rail, effectively bypassing the rivet, electrically speaking. Throwing a switch on the layout that is already starting to not work properly is just asking for trouble. And yes, that’s the voice of experience.