Need help. I have a couple of turnouts where just following the turnout (the diverging portion of the turnout) the power ends. Any track after that point is dead. What could be the issue? I have put a meter to it and rather than 15 volts, it is getting anywhere from 1 to 5 volts?
vipertodd
Try turning the points so that they line one of the routes, and then measure voltage on those rails beyond the frog. You should find that the appropriate rails do have power commensurate with the alignment of the rails. If not, your points don’t route power and you will have to wire the tracks beyond the frog. Make sure to leave a gap in the frog rails before joining the turnout proper.
A-yuh. What kind of turnouts are they?
There’s always the possibility that the turnouts are supposed to route power, but there’s a problem and they don’t. It’s usually that the point rails (the moving part) don’t make good electrical contact with the stock rails. This can be caused by dirty tracks (watch where the two pieces come together. That area has to be clean, and free of any paint, glue or oil residues) or by a weak switch motor which doesn’t put enough pressure on the point rail to hold it against the stock rail.
They are Atlas Snap Switches. I removed the manual throw and have been slowly retrofitting Caboose 208S ground throws. It seems that when I take the points and press hard against the rail, power will route through the diverging portion of the rail. Will conductive oil help at all?
No, you don’t want any kind of contaminants on your rails. They’ll reduce traction on metal loco wheels, and may even interact chemically with plastic wheels. Eventually, any oils will pick up dirt and require more frequent cleaning.
You’re probably going to need something that pushes the points harder. The Atlas switch machines (either manual or powered) that come with snap-switches do this with a flexible connecting shaft and over-throw of the mechanism. If the straight-through path is good and tight, you might be able to shift the throw over a bit, giving up a bit of pressure on the straight path but adding some to the divergent path.
Actually, I’m surprised that you’re seeing this with Atlas snap-switches. My experience with them is that they provide full connectivity to both paths all the time, regardless of which way the points are set.
If these are older turnouts, a good cleaning may be all that you need.
I was not going to use the oil on the rails but in the rivets that hold the points to the plastic rails. No contact would occur with the loco wheels. I removed the snap switch mechanism and I just use the plastic connector that the mechanism connects into to throw the switch.
FYI, I have been out of the hobby for 15 years. So the switches have 15 years of crud on them. I have used 800 grit sandpaper to clean the rails. Any suggestions on cleaning?
Are they brass? If so, be aware that brass track is a collectors’ item. In our town, they collect on Wednesdays. Put it out by the street and they’ll take it.
Really. Toss brass track. It’s not worth the aggravation. Brass tarnishes much more easily than nickel-silver, and the tarnish on brass is non-conductive.
You can get “contact cleaner” for the rivet connections, but chances are the problem is actually where the point rails hit the stock rails. Still, I don’t think Atlas snap-switches really use that connection to route power. I think the connections are hard-wired with jumper wires in the plastic underneath the rails.
No they are nickel silver. Here is a solution our local hobby shop suggested. Soldering a 1-conductor wire from the good rail to the diverging rail. He says that the contact was probably broken or has corrosion on it therefore it is not conducting correctly or if at all.
What do you think?
I would just run a jumper from the good rail to the dead rail on the siding. That should cause no problems, and it will “back-feed” the turnout where necessary. It’s a good idea to have feeder wires to sidings anyway, so you don’t have this problem if a turnout does fail to make a good connection.
I’d avoid actually soldering to the turnout. Its alignment is a bit more critical, and would suffer more if your soldering distorts the plastic any. Also, make sure the rail joiners around the turnout are solid. You might think about soldering these to eliminate any possibility that they’ll work loose in the future.
Hoping not to come across as stupid, but what is a jumper and how do you do it?
A jumper is just a wire that goes from one part of the track to another. Most track wiring is done using a “bus,” which is a pair of wires running beneath the layout, and “feeders” which are short, usually lighter gauge wires running up from the bus to the track. I guess a jumper is called that because the power is allowed to “jump” from one section of track directly to another.
You can simply take a piece of wire and solder it anywhere along the rail, and then solder the other end to the other rail. Since you’re using turnouts, you already have rail gaps where you need to put the jumpers, so it might be easier to solder the ends of the jumper to rail joiners, and then just use those to hold the tracks together. Of course, then you need a large enough hole in the layout to poke a rail joiner through.
Thanks so much. Tested it tonight and it works great. Thanks for the advice and expertise. If you are ever in Norman, OK. look me up. I will take you on a tour of my layout.