Ordinarily I hesitate to post basic questions in online forums for fear of being branded a Newbie; however, as in this case I am a Newbie–both to model railroading and to this forum–I figured I’d just as well take the plunge.
I’ve recently come into possession of an HO-scale layout of Bachmann “EZ-Track,” on which I’m running a little (HO) steam engine. I’m using a basic Bachmann power supply/speed controller for power and control (go figure). My problem is I can’t for the life of me figure out the switches–those funky little places whereby a train can switch off one track to another. These things have green wires coming out of them, which connect to “real” switches (the kind you flip to one setting or another, rather than the Track kind). How do I hook these up? They appear to be intended to be hooked into a power supply, and I attempted to do so using the red wire that came with the track set and plugging the stripped ends into the two little notches in the “buttons” atop the power supply–but either I’m plugging the other end in wrong, or those “buttons” really aren’t used to provide power to accessories, or turnout switches don’t count as the sorts of accessories that it can power.
At any rate, I’d be much obliged if someone could help me out!
These turnout activators, motors if you will, use AC current, and most power packs have two sets of posts on them…one set for the trains via the track, and that would be DC, while the other two are for powering accessories. Your turnouts have a set of wires ending in a black tab-socket, and your activating switch, in a large black box with either a slide button or a push button, has wires with three little metal tines. It doesn’t matter how you hook them up, just press them so that the tines are fully seated…upside down, the other way, doesn’t matter.
Now you will have to figure out how to power the black box, the switch, itself (railroaders refer to train diverting “switches” as turnouts, especially in the modelling world, because we really do use electric “switches”…hence, the diff to avoid confusion). You can get power cords will the same small plug and with bare wire ends at your hobby shop. Same as to the turnout wire, plug the tab into the tines on the side of the turnout controlling switch, and hook the other two ends to the AC terminals on the power pack.
When you activate the turnouts, do a quick push and release of the push-botton type of control. Any longer and you begin to heat up the electronics. Don’t let anything heavy lean on those buttons for more than a full second, or you’ll fry the works in the turnout. The slide button type are no problem.