A piece of metal laying on the track somewhere that you forgot – track gauge, Kadee coupler gauge, stray wire, etc.
2 Check the wires that connect the power pack to the track at both ends. Look for a stray strand of wire touching an adjacent terminal, particularly at the power pack end.
Did you make any recent changes or additions to your trackwork? Perhaps a new turnout added that might have an internal short or needs to have an insulated rail joiner.
Brakie – one of the places I play is the Groton sub base. Providence and Worcester runs right beside it. That passing Geep is a good excuse for why you duffed your shot. Besides, chasing that little white ballaround is good exercise (I know --some train buffs have trouble recognizing exercise when they see it. [:)]
You need to find a driving range like I found. The balls have little chips inside them and it tells you distance and accuracy to targets. Its like enormous golf-darts. All the competitiveness of a scoring sport, but doing away with all that pesky walking. Also it had a full menu and a full bar, and very attractive waitresses.
I endeavor to win the lottery as soon as possible so that I can spend several hours a day there in the daylight hours (and the warm summer evening hours) before retiring to the layout room. Or the small N scale shelf layout…in my private railcar…
I had added a second wire from the power source to the track - then connected to an Atlas controller where the initial wire was attached - I adjusted the wires on the controller - perhaps one was touching something it
shouldn’t have touched - in any event after reattaching the second power wire the overload apparently
was corrected - at least the light does not now come on.
I thought I had yesterday’s turnout problem solved but my EMD8 still fails to make the turn about half the runs through it - perhaps my best solution is to retire the EMD8 or start to run it in the opposite way.
Golf is still three months away - gives me more time to be MR frustrated.
What we need, clearly, are winter rules for model railroading: the ability to declare things to be fine when they are not fine, and the ability to declare a task finished when it is not finished. Problem is when would we have the interior discipline to go back to regualr rules?
Classic workshop wisdom is that if a problem develops, you reason backwards through every change you have made or every bit of work that has been done going back to when things were fine. There are things that can go wrong with a turnout particularly if it is the kind that has hidden interior wiring such as some Pecos.
Would an engine run at all if there was a true dead short? Seems to me it would not but I suppose an “almost” short involving a poor conductor of electricity might be acting as a resistor high enough to tax the power supply. This could be such things as wires close but not exactly touching and as the current is increased, it bridges the little gap and creates a very weak or intermittent short.
I remember a buddy had a nice little metal kit of a handcar on a siding on his layout and he counted on the paint on the wheels to be the insulation. Over time it might be that the current actually more or less burned through the paint and one night his layout would not run at all. We followed the Sherlock Holmes dictate that when everything but the impossible has been eliminated, the impossible must be the solution and sure enough removing that handcar suddenly made the layout come back to life. It had been there for years untouched!
I agree. Unless you have an empire with 50 locos and 400 cars, pull everything off the rails. Still shorted? If not, put them back on one by one until the offender is found.
I once had a hair fine piece of what looked like steel wool fiber wire wrapped around the axle of an insulated wheel set on a gondola. Until I found it, I had what looked like intermittent shorts when running a train with that car in the consist. I spent a lot of time finding that one!
If that’s the only locomotive you’ve got roblems with on that turnout, and not with your others, it’s probably a problem with that particular locomotive. Check the play on the trucks. Sometimes they are too tight right out of the box and need to be loosened a bit. I have an Atlas U25B that was derailing and it was the only locomotive that derailed on that one turnout. All the rest of the locomotives (or most of them, I haven’t tried them all), even the six-axle equipment, had no problems.
While that may be true, that is not always the case.
Before blaming the locomotive, I would want to know if that particular locomotive makes it through all of the other turnouts without derailing.
It is not uncommon to find a particular locomotive that derails on a particular turnout but not on any other turnout. In that case, it is probably the turnout.