To those of you that have wired your round house tracks and the radial tracks around your turntable, how did you wire them for track power? Did you run the wires into a common terminal block then wire the block(s) to your main buss, or run each and every feeder wire from said tracks to the main buss? That would be an awful lot of connections to make doing it that way.
JaRRell
Use a rotary switch. Run a common wire to (facing the round house from the turn table) all the left hand rails. Run the other feeder to the input side of the rotary switch and connect each output to the corresponding track’s right hand rail. Perhaps on of electrical engineers can explain better than me. Ken
I use also use a rotory switch, so I am able to only power one track at a time. It’s safer that way. One rail of each track is connected to the common feed, and the other rail to the terminal of the rotory switch.
Nick
I don’t know about the need for a safer arrangement, since the DCC system is self-limiting and will shut down long before you fry any decoders. HOwever, I simply cut three sets of feeders, one middle longish one, and two short ones on each side, almost like a three-way turnout. I then wind the ends and solder reliability, feed the tips up against the appropriate rails, always on the side away from view, and solder them to the rails. The central longer feeder gets soldered into the bus wherever the path is shortest. This arrangement has worked for me marvelously.
The only thing left out is the reversing mechanism for polarity. You have a choice between wiring it into the bridge circuit or into the three-way yolk between the bus and the two feeders.
Since I only have 5 tracks (3 for Atlas RH), I have wired them as seperate blocks with Atlas connector switches. This was originally wired & run as DC only. If you are using DCC only, they can all be wired to a common buss, the locos know who they are[8D]
I originally wired mine to a common point, since it was temporary pending the pit-bash of the Atlas turntable. I had put a set of toggle switches on the control panel so I could shut down each track individually, but I found I didn’t seem to need that with DCC. Now that I’ve got sound engines, though, I’ve re-considered and will now be wiring one side of each track to the SPST switches so they can be selectively powered down.
If you “mute” an engine with F8, it will come back up with sound if you shut off your DCC system. So, I’d rather be able to park them on a totally dead track. At thei same time, I would rather be able to leave them powered on sometimes to keep the sound running while the engines are “waiting,” so I prefer this arrangement to a rotary switch which only allows one active loco at a time.
Thank you all for the replies. There I go again NOT mentioning I’m using dcc and the answer to my question would rely to an extent on dc or dcc. I apoligise (again!) for that.
As Lou says, on dcc the engines know who they are, and I also can see that if you’re running dc you would need to wire things up so that each track can be selected individually and a rotary switch would be great. When I get to the wiring part, and that will be soon, I think I’m going to go with the terminal strip type setup, maybe even wiring a simple on/off toggle switch so that I can kill power to all those track, and the amp eating dcc/sound locomotives that are sitting there.
JaRRell
Remember that if your locos are QSI equipped, you can shut them down and they will not resume making sounds when you next power up the layout as the Soundtraxx ones do. You double tap F9 three times within three seconds of each previous double tap, and the loco will shut down and stay down until you acquire it on your throttle and press F6 to awaken it.
Is the engine still drawing amps from my little Zephyr (I gotta get more amps!) while it is in shutdown mode?
JaRRell
It is only on listening mode, so it is drawing what the LCD display on your wristwatch is drawing. It is providing no motive power to the motor, the biggest single draw for a loaded locomotive, and it is providing no sound impulse to the speaker, so your loco is effectively dead. You amperage loss, therefore, is probably much less than a micro-amp per decoder that is shut down. You could have forty such locos in F9 shutdown on your powered track, not isolated track, and still have 4.9+ amps to play with in a 5 amp DB 150.
JaRRell, I routinely shut down non-used locos since I can realistically only operate a couple or three at any one time. The noise, for one thing, drives me crazy because it can’t be scaled on a layout that measures 9 X 14’. If the distances were to scale, I’d have two locos within 200 meters, and others would be too far to be heard, even in a yard. When I am operating my layout, everything is within 8’, and the steamers, particularly, overpower the diesels, and the QSI’s overpower the Tsunamis. Accordingly, the QSI decoders are muted if only idle, although I set my mute for about 20% of the normal volume, or they are F9ed entirely so that I can experience my FA2/FB2 set with that modest Sountraxx DSD 100 LC decoder that is otherwise an excellent decoder. When a single QSI is operating, I haven’t a hope of hearing much out of my Heritage 0-6-0, right next to me, with its Tsunami.
Ok… thanks for the tip, I’ll give it a try. I know what you mean about needing to mute some sound engines, I do the same at times. [:)]
JaRRell