I think I am answering my own question as I am writing this post.
I am adding three Tortouse switches. They are 10’ from the panel so I used Two Terminal Strips one at each end. When I hooked up the first one it worked fine. When I hooked up the second one all the lights dimmed when I throw the switch. Do I have to wire each Tortouse to the switch individually or can I use some of what I was trying to do and not have to run all that wire?
I think your over complicating the installation one switch wired directly to one Tortoise as per their instructions is all you need to do. The distance should not be of any concern.
May I ask why your mounting the switch so far from the turnout? Is it a question of having a central control panel or are these turnouts far back out of reach on the layout?
Pretty much the norm is to mount the switch with in close proximity of the turnout so you can operated the turnout while following the train around the layout.
No. I was just trying to make it easy.I figured by having two terminal with only one wire in between would save me a lot of work. The reason for the distance is there is a Control Panel on one side and these turnouts are in the back.
The wiring doesn’t look right to me. Did you leave something out? Typically you would use a double pole double throw switch to change the polarity to the turnout to change direction.
If I understand the drawing correctly, you’ll have a short circuit every time the toggle switches are out of synch.
Each Tortoise is a constant voltage “stall motor”, meaning there’s always electricity applied to the machine. If you’re using one pair of wires on two Tortoise machines from two DPDT toggles, you’ll always have a short when one is one way and one is the other.
On every Tortoise & DPDT circuit, you must have a seperate pair of control wires between them. At my club, we use 22AWG 6-cond. round phone cable. That gives us not only power (2-wires), but also three wires for switch indication off the Tortoise machine’s internal contact (plus a spare wire). Some of our switches are located well over 20 feet away with no appreciable problem. Sure, they more slower after 20 feet of 22AWG, but that’s not an issue, generally. The 16AWG you’re using as shown seems a bit of an overkill.
Paul A. Cutler III
Thanks Paul. The 16 Ga was just because I had it in a big roll for Bus Wire. The telephone wire is a good idea. At this point I only use two connections so I might use the wire cable ( 3 pairs ) to wire all three switches and keep everything neat. I now so what I am doing wrong
The correct wiring for the tortoise can be found here:
That link produces an error. Can you correct and re-post?
Yeah no way is that goign to work, the way that’s drawn, if you move one toggle, both Tortoise will move, but if the toggles are opposite each other, you create a dead short through the power supply. Two wires to each Tortoise, not ganged or otherwise coupled to another Tortoise unless you are trying to make two turnouts move at the same time, like for a crossover. No common wiring back at the switches, either, although you could connect your pwoer supply to a termianl strip and feed each toggle from the terminal strip. But the output of the toggle has to go to a Tortoise and you can’t use one pair of wires to control multiple Tortoises independently.
–Randy
I believe this is what you’re looking for: http://www.tonystrains.com/download/man-tortoise.pdf
I use Cat5 cabling and punchdown blocks for flexibility.
Reference section 1 of diagram 4 of the instructions that were posted. Run one pair of wires to each tortoise for a total of 4 wires. Use a double pole double throw switch for each tortoise as shown in the tortoise instructions. Do not use the single throw switches, you will short your power supply. This is a summary of all the other posts.
Single throw basically will allow only one direction of travel. It shouldn’t short anything, unless of course you wire like the original post.
The short happens when you throw one single pole. The short is opened when you throw the other. With a double throw switch that can’t happen. I am assuming all switches to be double pole.
The reason the single pole switch would short is how they’re wired. If it was wired with one leg in series with the torti’s it would work fine in one direction.
The original pic actually shows DPDT which I hadn’t noticed earlier. If you remove one of the switches the 2 torti’s could work correctly on a crossover. That’s providing the 2 wires from the switch were connected to the common and the source voltage were crossed between the NO and NC contacts.