Wiring Question

Model Railroader Layouts and layout building
1

Please help - guru’s of trackwork!

I recently invested in a FastTracks turnout fixture in an effort to save some dough on turnouts. The fixture works great - turnout #1 took about 3 hours to build, #2 about 2 hours and now I am down to about 1.5 hours to build and paint one - they look awesome ( no hinged points) and work so much smoother than the Peco Medium and Large Radius T/O’s I have been using - as per the instruction video you can even run a single truck through the T/O before the guradrails have been soldered in place - no problem!

Even better is that you can actually repair a turnout by unsolderering the parts (frog or throwbar or whatever) and replacing it.

On to the question - the FastTracks turnouts are all live (stockrails and closure rails have same polarity) - the frog is electrically isolated from the stock rails by gaps allround - are these T/O’s wired the same way as the power routing jobs such as Peco?

Are the same rulles applicable? i.e. only feed power from the toe end ad gaps between frog to frog T/O’s?

How would you wire a Tortoise to throw the points and also control the polarity?

Is a Tortoise safe to use with DCC (5 AMPS)?

2

I’m not guru bust since no one else has chimed in I think I can answer your Tortoise question … or most of it.

Tortoise is designed to work with 12VDC or less. It wont work with AC. So you need a separate power supply for your switch machines (a good idea in any case). A 9-12 VDC 500ma wall wart will operate about 30 Tortoise machines according to Circuitron.

Tortoise also has auxiliary contacts to control panel lights, power frogs, etc.

There is a new accessory DCC decoder called the “Hare” I think that is custom-made for the Tortoise machine.

Here’s some wiring info:

http://www.wiringfordcc.com/sw_ctl.htm

Have fun,