My thought is, I do not se the point of an edge card connector PLUS screw terminals. Either one alone allows an easy no-solder way to dsiconnect the wiring.
The molex conenctors do require soldering - but all that done sittign at a comfortable table, not under the layout. In fact in a club situation you cna mass produce these, one person clamping and soldering the first to pins, then another person soldering the remaining 6. An evening of this will outfit enough Tortoises to keep the track gang supplied for weeks. Sort of how I do my powered joiners, except I do all that myself. First cut adn strip lengths of wire, then go bend all of the stripped ends to 90 degrees, then go solder each wire to a fresh joiner. A few hours of this and I have a box full of powered joiners ready to go, adn since EVERY joiner I install is a powered one I need quite a few. The Atlas premade ones would be insanely expensive - a pair costs about the saem as a whole pack of plain joiners, a few hours work and I have 48 pairs for the same price plus the cost of < 100 feet of thin wire.
Well this is the dealer I used to get mine off of eBay.ot can be found here They fit well however they do have the little styrene inserts on the end to keep the edge board from moving around. At 2.91 a piece it isn’t bad. I made my own boards which have a DPDT relay so I can use push buttons or diode matrix to throw them for my yard.
I am going to recommend to the club that we leave the wires that are already soldered to the used Tortoises in place and use connector blocks to feed them. The wires are plenty long enough to get to the connector blocks so I see no need to make an easy solution more complex. I will have a close look at the solder connections on the Tortoise terminals before we install them.
We have looked at those connectors. The individual prices aren’t too bad, but our problem is that we need about 75 of them, and we are in Canada which jumps the price significantly. The total would be about $730.00 Cdn taxes and shipping in. That is almost 10% of the budget for the whole layout. Hard to justify.
If budget is a factor, I recommend using Cat5 cable and an E-bay cheapo barrier strip terminal. Under $.50 per tort, rock solid in reliability and easy to install.
cut the terminal strip down to an 8 section piece & save the “extras” for other uses. Desolder the old wires from the tort. Cut a piece of 2’ cat5 cable and separate the wires (develope a color code plan) and solder the wires onto the tort. The other end of the cat5 cable can be inserted into the terminal strip using the same color code with a screw driver. The extra length of cat5 cable allows the terminal strip to be located (#4 screws) just about anywhere convient under the layout.
We are already ahead of you as far as the terminal strips go. One of our members had found the same item on eBay, but thanks for the confirmation that they will work.
As far as the Cat 5 cable goes, I appreciate your suggestion. Currently we have 31 used Tortoise machines that have already had different coloured wires soldered to the connectors, so we have decided to wire the rest of the Tortoises the same way. All of the used Tortoises have been tested, and true to form, they all worked great.
To clarify our situation, we have decided to not use the edge connectors. There are much cheaper ways to accomplish the same thing, i.e. solder wires directly to the Tortoise circuit board before the Tortoises are installed and use terminal strips to make the connections under the layout. The cost difference worked out to be about $9.00 Cdn less per Tortoise.