This is my 2nd yr. in model railroading. I have been using the bachman easy track. But now I want to go to the more realistic look. I recieved some older track but I am having problems with the turnouts. I'm trying to make the train yard but I believe I am short circuting the track. I am hooking it up the same way as the backman but the train will not run past the turn outs. What am i doing wrong? Is there a difference between the backman turnouts and the old style track. please help.
Most sectional track turnouts have dead frogs and internal conections that allow a locomotive to run on either branch no matter which way the points are set. OTOH, 'traditional' turnouts have live frogs, and the entire frog, and both closure rails, are powered by contact between the closed point and that point's stock rail.
Two things about turnouts:
The subject of wiring a model railroad can be quite simple, or very complex. If you are running analog DC, there are critical differences between that and DCC. If you can find it, Linn Westcott's How To Wire Your Model Railroad is very helpful. Lacking your track plan, I'm afraid that's the best I can do.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
Without knowing more details, such as the brand name of the turnouts, scale, and type (i.e., Peco Electrofrog or Peco Insulfrog) there's not much we can help you with.
Bachmann turnouts come with "dead" frogs. Under the turnout you can connect up a wire to make the frogs "live" (powered) if you want.
BTW you don't have to replace the Bachmann track, just improve it. You can "paint" the rail sides with Neo-Lube, a synthetic lubricant you can get from Micro-Mark, then use a brightboy to clean the top of the rails. Paint a few of the ties dark brown, some a lighter brown, and some gray, leaving about half of them black. Then add ballast, maybe a fine gray mix.
If you look at Bachmann's ads for their track, you can see how with a little work it can turn out quite well.
Do you mean the train stalls on the turnout and needs a little push to get going, or won't it run past the turnout PERIOD? Are you using insulated rail joiners to "block" out your layout?A multi meter would be a good start to check and see where your track has power and where it doesn't.The use of more than one set of power wires to feed power to your track is pretty much a must. Most people feed power to the track about every 6' and to every siding.
I believe I rectified the problem .I was insulating only one rail instead of both rails. and I had the rail wire from the turnout going to the ac instead of the dc. Does that sound right?
Yes. Everything provided to the rails should be DC current on an analog DC layout. DC only to any part of the rail system. DCC is something else, an AC square wave, but that would be all a DCC layout should ever get to the rails. So I believe, if I understand you, that your frog was mismatched for the rest of the system by connecting it to AC posts. In fact, I would bet that you won't need to power your frog at all, although much older engines may actually require powered frogs.
When you have a siding with turnouts at each end, I think a good practise, generally, is to gap one end of the tangent between them and to ensure that the one non-gapped turnout really does feed it reliably.