I have an older verney cattle car w/metal floor, metal trucks and I just installed intermountain all steel wheels w/Kadee #5 couplers. My issue is that everytime I put it on the track at the club, it causes a short on the line it is standing on?
One member told me that all wheels have “polarity” and actually said that the small inner hub that is on the axel at the wheel is actually a marker defining the positive or negative position. I have been playing with model trains since I was 7 and I have never heard this before in this capicity (i do understand that some wheels / wheel sets are insulated thus polarity matters) and now I am totally vexxed by his statement. I tried aligning the wheels up per his instructions but I continued to “short” out?
Any help, commemts or suggstions are truly appreciated!
Those inner hubs are insulators. They need to all be on the same side of the car. Either side doesn’t matter. This means that the car itself will be live to ONE rail, depending on your decision made above.
If you still have a short, the problem is likely with a failed insulating piece in the wheel sets. You can find which one by putting a piece of paper under each of the insulated wheels (while the car is on the track) until the problem goes away.
If you find that all the hubs are in good working order, the fault likely lies with one or more of the insulated wheels touching or scraping the truck sideframe or car floor.
If the car only has the short when it’s coupled to another car or loco, that brings up a new problem. For now, let’s ignore that.
If your car is older they have ribbed back wheels as well. One other thing to keep in mind and as the “other” Ed pointed out above, is that if you go with the Intermountain and get the insulated wheel lined up on one side of the car you may STILL have track current flowing through the frame and into the coupler! SO if you were to have two such cars coupled and they just happened to be running with the opposite side insulated you would get a short too! One in a million chance… but you know how the Gremlins can be! (Kadee makes a line of insulated-shank couplers, too)
That’s one of the reasons we got rid of all the old Kadee metal trucks and use only plastic. Most of us are switching to Kato or Tahoe Model works trucks for our rolling stock that had Kadee metal trucks.
Several years ago a reefer with Kadee metal trucks was knocked slightly off the track at an ice house scene on our HO scale club layout. The short was not enough to trip the PSX-AR or DCC booster, but the heat buildup was enough to melt the bottom of the car.
After that, we started getting rid of metal trucks.
I am sort of surprized that the I-M metal wheel sets stay in the trucks. A lot of my old metal side frames are too big for the I-M axle length. I have sort of resigned to using one piece plastic side frame - The ‘real’ coil springs in HO trucks are too small, and don’t really provide any equalization. My ‘Go To’ truck right now is Accurail side frames with I-M metal wheels(after using the Micro-Mark ‘Truck Tuner’).
One thing that could be going on is the wheel on the insulated side could be touching the metal frame and shorting out. Proto 2000 metal wheels are another brand that has plastic axles.
If the club runs DCC and you run conventional DC at home, typically, DCC systems are more sensative to intermittant shorts than DC power packs. DCC will trip much quicker than DC.