I have a LL powerloc track crossing gate that wont stay down, when the cars go over it the arms go up and down, up and down. So is there a way to fix this?
IIRC, the activation pad isn’t very long. This causes the gate to rise up in the middle of a car. You might try extending that activation pad with some styrene. Or just run 20’ cars…[:-^]
My cousin had one of those back in the 60’s, it did the same thing.
It’s a toy, not much you can really do about it.
I had one of those on my first layout. The problem I noticed with it was that lighter cars would make it go back up. Make sure all of your cars are up to NMRA weight standards.
I’ve got one of those- got it when I was first starting out and realize it’s a toy yes, but somewhat realistic. I had the same problem; I cut the activation pad out and just locked the crossing arm in the down position permanetley. It got to the point it was shorting out my loco and causing it to stop moving when it got to it. I said enough is enough to that problem.
They really aren’t built to be realistic. And they can derail lighter cars. But I did actually solve the problem for a short time, I used a small piece of I guess it was Fun Tak (that paper hanging stuff) and put it in the arm, since most of these are based on older wooden gate models. I used just enough weight to keep it stable when down but assure it went back up when the train cleared. As a matter of fact it went up slower, therefore more realistically. Can’t guarantee it will work.
This does give me the chance to mention this though, I took these same gates, N scale in this case, and made one of them a static model. With a little rearranging of the weights and some paint and repositioning of the signal lamps, it looks pretty good. Still can’t do much about the fact that it’s oversized in N tho.