I have an HO layout in my basement and a friend of mine says I should solder all the track for better electrical connections. I will be using dcc on code 100 track and have ran #12 wire as my bus wire and I am feeding the track from the bus wire with #18 bell wire about on average every 8 feet or so. I have soldered the track in the curves and at present I am not having electrical problems, but he says in time the rail jointers will loosen up and give me problems. I am afraid of problems with the track not being able to give if it expands with the different seasons. What do you think?
Are you using flextrack or sectional track? With flextrack you should be okay, but with the many joints on the sectional track I think that it might make a difference, but I don’t know.
Reed
I am using flextrack, so there wouldn’t be more than a couple of rail jointers beween feeders. I am getting ready to paint the rails and then ballast the track and was wanting to make sure I have the electrical part done before I did this so that when I ballast I will be able to cover up the feeder wires so that they cant be seen
The problems at rail joiners and turnouts start when you paint and balast the track. It’s a good Idea to solder the rail jointers that carry current or feed every peice of track. I like to spend a little extra time doing wiring because it’s importance to have good conductivity to ensure good operation.
Leave some joints unsoldered on the straights for expansion. Solder enough feeders so that you don’t rely on unsoldered rail joints to carry the current. Trackwork and wiring are the two most critical components to having a layout that is fun vs a maintenance nightmare.
Enjoy
Paul
It sounds like you have adequate feeders to not worry about soldering all of your rail joints on the straight runs. In the future, if you start to experience problems with dead spots, you can always go back and solder the joints then. Something else I always advise people to do is to not solder turnouts. Turnouts are the only track items with moving parts, and if anything is ever going to fail it will be a turnout. If they’re not soldered in place, it’s much easier to change them. If you do need to provide a better power feed to a turnout because rail joiners are loose, solder feeder wires only to the two outer stock rails near the center of the turnout, so it will still be easy to replace if necessary.
Check my answer under “Track Shrinkage”. As a slight clarification, the spikes were inserted through the plastic (molded in) spikes of the flextrack. If the rails are anchored in place, they cannot move with temperature changes. Temperature fluctuations will develop internal stresses if the track cannot move. This is how the prototype is able to use welded rail. We are dealing with metal solids, not liquids. Metals can absorb a certain amount of stress before buckling if it is restrained from movement. We are not dealing with water, which is essentially imcompressible.
On my layout I’m soldering feeders to every length of rail, so the rail joiners aren’t really part of the curent path. I solder the joiners on curves before bending to make smoother joints, but I don’t solder the joiners in straight track and leave expansion gaps there the thickness of an NMRA gauge.
When we built the MR&T club layout a few years ago with did things a little differently. We soldered all the rail joiners and dropped feeders from every other section of flextrack. This has proved to be thoroughly reliable. We did have some kinks develop in long stretches of straight track in one staging yard, probably because of shrinkage in the benchwork as the temperature is pretty stable. The kinks looked alarming but proved easy to fix by cutting through each rail with a cutoff disk in a motor tool. The width of the disk was generally sufficient to let the rails straighten out, and since we already had feeders on both sides of each cut, the cuts didn’t affect electrical continuity.
So long,
Andy
I’ve mentioned in other threads that rail joiners should be used for track alignment only, not electrical conductivity. My practice has been to solder track feeders to every section of rail. (I never solder rail joiners to track any more.) You only have to do it right once. Recently, our club ballasted the track that was laid, powered, and tested last year. We found about a 6 foot section that had relied on the rail joiners to carry the power that had become insulated by the glue in the rail joiners. The track was dead as a post! After dropping new feeders to all the affected rail sections, the trains were running again. I still don’t know how we missed the lack of feeders on that section initially!
Mark C.
I’ll second that!!
I solder a small guage jumper wire across the joint on the underside of the track where it is needed. Sometimes I solder on side of the joiner to keep it centerd on the joint if ties have been removed. I’m wheelchair bound so it helps to keep as much work on top of the benchwork as possible. Ballast easily hides the jumper wire and cork roadbed can be notched out for the jumper and still allow the track to sit flat on the roadbed.