I recently bought some plastic insulators for my model railroads sidings so that my engines don’t run when i have them parked on the sidings. but i ran into a problem. When i need to use the engine, i can’t get it to come off the siding without me sticking something metal on top of the tracks. Why is this happening and how can i fix it?
your engine don’t run because you have electrically isolated the section of track. IE: there is no flow of elctricity, thus engine don’t run.
you could add jumper wires from the ‘live’ rails to the isolated rails. make one rail a solid connection. on the other rail, add a momentary push button or a SPST toggle switch to allow the flow of electricity only when you want that section of rail to be ‘live’. i’ve done this before the awesome invention of DCC with great results.
Never put metal on tracks. When you isolate a track w/insulators, you need a toggle swicth to power the track. DC and DCC are different. What do you use? Dane
Well, Insulators insulate, meaning they block the flow of electricity to the rails they are connected to. When you place metal on the rails, you connect the circut and electricty flows to your engines. What you need to do is get a simple on/off switch and wire it up as in this scematic:
If you want your engines to move, turn the switch on, if you want them to not move, turn the switch off.
If you need clarification on what is connected and what is not, post a reply.
Hope this helps.
Sounds like you need a primer on basic electricity for your model railroad. Scroll down to the “Basic Wiring” heading for your particular problem:
http://www.nmra.org/beginner/wiring.html
Also, the main “beginner’s” page here should help you with many other facets of model railroading. Just click on the headings in the box on the right side of the screen.
I’m still using DC power.
DC or DCC makes no difference in this case. Track is still insulated from main with the plastic joiners.
Here is a link to a wiring book, “though not complete”. It should give you some ideas about mrr wiring. You might find the book in a library.
If you are good with a PC, expand the page to what you would like and click the Print Screen button on your keyboard. This will save what is one the screen to the Clip board in your PC. Then open an application for photos and paste the photo into the application from the Clip board. A little practice and you will be able to save a lot of stuff on the 'Net into your PC. I do this at times with Google books if the book is not download-able. If you get a Google account, you can build your own library in Google and save that page. I have stored that book in my library for future reference for other.
Put the link in your favorites folder for future use. The site has options to expand the page for easier reading.
Rich