wiring a lionel 313

[Anonymous]

Alright, the manual says that the outside rail of your track should be hot and the inside rail should be common. (weird huh?) This kind of sucks because now half of my whistles/horns don't work because the polarity is all screwed up. (I am using a ZW btw) I was kind of okay with that, I was just going to buy a whistle controller and be done with it. But I ran into another problem. There is a light in the bridge with one wire to the outside rail and one that goes to one side of the motor, the other side of the motor goes to 14V. The problem is that when I stop a train on the track current leaks thru the motor, thru the bulb and to the track, so I can't reverse my trains. Let me expand on that a little, I can reverse e-unit type trains because they drop out pretty high, but my fancy digital reversing units don't.. So my question to you all is, is my bridge wired wrong (I think this could be true). or should I just leave by lightbulb out? If anyone knows where I could get a schematic of the bride itself, or if someone could just tell me how the lightbulb functions (ie only lights when....) I could probably figure it out.

[Anonymous]

i gave up trying to get my 313 wired 100% correctly and i said to heck with the light and everything worked great. then it really started to bug me so i redid the connection from teh light housing to the power source so it would work when the motor is running. (i think post 3 non-contact post)

HTH
Brian

[Anonymous]

As far as I can tell moving the light to post 3 would make the bulb track lit. In fact come to think of it the design seems entirely retarded, If one end of the bulb is supposed to go to hot lead on the track, where else could the bulb go but common? Is the bulb supposed to be track lit? Every 313 I have ever seen has the bulb going to post 2(common side of motor). I am starting to think my bridges wiring is all funky, or somebody at lionel was a funky monkey.