What to do about small diameter wheeled steam locomotives and the frog in an atlas turnout? Any time my locomotive approaches the frog at a reasonable to slow speed, it will stall on the frog. I had been away from model railroading for some twenty years, and upon coming back, I just thought a switch is a switch. I have some other switches on the layout a Peco and a Walthers and they work fine. What can I do? Also, I’m not opposed to just tearing the Atlas out and replacing with one that is not so anti-small wheel. What to do???
Are these the ones with the plastic frog?
If so, not much you can do about the turnout other than replace it with something with a “live” frog. Doing that, you need to switch the frog polarity according tow which way the points are thrown.
With the plastic frog, many locos with a short wheelbase will stall. You can sometimes modify the loco by adding pickups. Start with adding pickup on both sides of the tender, as it usually is set up just on one side and the trucks make it easier to install wipers.
Most locos pick up on one side only, but it’s a little harder to say how to add pickups. If it’s a 4-4-0, you may be able to add pickups to the lead truck. If a single axle lead truck, it’s trickier.
So two solutions. If you have a lot of those switches, it may be easier to add wipers. If just a few, it may be easier to tear them out and go with live frogs, as it’s not a big deal to add them when laying track. I suspect your other brand switches have this built in with contacts, depends on the exact ones you have. That’s probably why they are not a problem for this loco.
Short of replacing the turnout with an electro-frog type you can add pickups to the tender so it picks up from both rails and keeps power going to the locos even when the drivers are on the plastic turnout.
What to do??? Switch them out for Fast Tracks (FT) turnouts. FT turnouts have live frogs and I have NEVER had a stalling problem since.
If you don’t want to shell out the $$$ for the jigs and fixtures to make them yourself, check out eBay. You can purchase FT turnouts - straight or curved - in just about any size and code and they are already wired and painted for you. And they cost about the same price as - if not less than - Peco turnouts.
I also like that fact that FT turnouts come with one-piece point rails rather than two-piece rails that pivot on a rivet. I think they look terrific…
Tom
Hello “Silverton,”
If this is one of the Atlas turnouts with a cast metal frog insulated from the rest of the turnout, there are two possibilities. One is that the frog is slightly higher than the adjacent rails. When it lifts the wheels in the rigid frame of a small steam engine, they lose contact with the live rails and are only contacting the dead frog. The easy way to fix that is to use a small mill file to make the frog level with the adjacent rails.
Once the frog is level you may still have troubles just because the frog is dead. If you use switch machines you can power the frog through auxiliary switching contacts on the switch machine. If you use ground throws or some other manual operation, you can power the frog through a Tam Valley Depot Frog Juicer circuit. This requires connecting three wires, one to the frog and one to each turnout stock rail. The Frog Juicer then powers the frog and automatically switches polarity when it detects a short circuit. It’s all electronic, and no mechanical switching is necessary.
Learn more about the Frog Juicer at tamvalleydepot.com.
Good luck,
Andy
Hi,
I use Atlas code 100 turnouts - 4, 6, and 8. When I installed the #8s, I soon found that the long frog would stop various locos. The answer was simple, and that was wiring in an Atlas relay.
As I use #8 in pairs for crossovers on the main, one relay would operate both frogs in the crossover.
I’ve not had any of my locos stall on the # 6s or 4s, but you could power them as well if need be.
BTW, I was really happy to see Atlas come out with code 100 # 8 turnouts. They are absolutely terrific with longer locos and passenger trains on crossovers or whatever.
Now Tom, don’t get ahead of yourself. Fastracks-made turnouts have live frog - after you hook up some sort of power routing contacts. So do Atlas Custom-Line. Atlas SNap Switchers, not so much. TO swap out a Snap Switch will likely require a good bit of refitting as they are not at all like any of the numbered frog turnouts, either Atlas Custom Line or other brand or hand laid.
Of course, I’ve gone through the trouble of adding a frog power wire to all of mine, and without any hooked up - nothing stalls or hesitates. Surely if I forgot to wire one, that would be where my locos would stall. Now that I made it easy to fix a possible power loss - there is none.
–Randy
I have to agree with Andy on this one.
The Atlas frogs are not plastic, they are metal, but they are insulated from the rest of the layout.
Andy’s solutions are the answer, no need to power the frogs, no need to replace the turnouts.
Rich
In any turnout, the frog is where the North rail of the thru track joins the South rail of the diverging track. Connecting North to South is a dead short circuit, and so the frog is electrically isolated from the rails. Some turnouts just leave the frog electrically dead, and other fancier turnouts arrange to power the frog from contacts on the switch machine or elsewhere.
If you have a “dead frog” turnout, AND the locomotive is so short that ALL the pickup wheels on one side fit onto the dead frog, then the locomotive stops for lack of electricity. But before tearing out an otherwise good turnout there are some other things you can take a look at.
-
Do ALL the locomotive and tender wheels actually pick up juice? Or is some wheel wiper missing, bent, crud covered or what have you, leaving a one-wheel pickup?
-
Do all the wheels actually touch the rails all the way thru the turnout? Or is the bottom of the locomotive touching part of the turnout and lifting some wheels off the rails?
-
Are all the necessary rail bits in the turnout powered? A missing jumper strap, a broken wire, a bent or cruddy pickup tab, dirt inside the points can leave sizable sections of the turnout dead when they should be powered. Use a voltmeter or test l
One thng that has not been mentioned is if the Atlas turnouts are Code 100 or Code 83. If code 83, it is no problem soldering a feeder wire to the frog; however, if code 100, Atlas frogs on these are some kind of “pot metal” that does not accept solder - it just does not stick to the stuff.
For code 100 Atlas turnouts, I drill and tap the hole in the frog for a 2-56 screw. I cut the head off the screw and saw a slot in it the top for a screwdriver. I screw the cut off screw into the threaded hole and solder the feeder wire to the tip of the screw. Once the frog is painted rust color, the top of the screw is not noticable. The feeder wire can be connected to contacts on the switch machine, Snap Relay or some other device to change the polarity of the frog.
The code 83 ones don’t solder any better. I use 1-72 brass screws in mine and then solder the wire to that. Since I’m doing this as I install them, I run the screw up from the bottom until it’s flush at the top, and then hit the tiny bit of shiny brass with paint when I paint the rails. There’s no need to tap the hole first, the frog metal is so soft that the brass screw can tap itself. After the fact, there’s not much option but to install the screw from the top, but once a wire is soldered on anything objectionable can be painted over to hide it.
Another option, not sure if it is still available, but at one time you could order just the hardware from Atlas. There is a screw and brass tab that comes with the Deluxe Untertable Switch Machine that is designed to provide the frog polarity contacts and it screws tot he hole in the frog. Using the screw from that kit and the piece of brass contact strip as a sodlerign point can accomplish the same thing. Probably not as cheap as a bag of small brass screws though, but if you are picky about doing it the ‘official’ way…
–Randy