Terminal Strips

[cccpro]

I am building a medium size N-Scale layout. I am planning to use DCC I have a 7 track yard, 4 thru tracks and 3 stub. It seems a terminal strip may make wiring easier. If terminal strips are the way to go I need some advice on how to wire them[?]. Do the feeders go to one side of the strip with the bus tapping into the other? Do I use jumpers? Any guidance would be appreciated.

[Pennsy58]

I use 8 screw terminal strips for my yards and DCC. They are mounted to the side of the joists under the layout in a fairly central location to the yard. Purchased them at Radio Shack. They come with a jumper plate as I call it. It slides into the screws so that the are all hot and independent to positive and negative. i.e. left side of the terminal is hot and right side is neg.

I soldered wires of the same gauge (as the main bus) from the main bus wires and screwed them to each side of the terminal. This creates a kind of branch off from the main bus to make wiring all the tracks in the yard easier. And of course the main bus continues on down the line.

Then the feeder wires from each area of track in the yard runs to the terminal and simply get screwed down to the terminal. There may be a specific length noted somewhere but I keep the feeder wires to the terminal under a foot. Something to think of when deciding where to place the terminal strip.

Always a good practice to keep the color of the wires the same for left and right but it becomes very important when using terminals to prevent a short. I use red for the left rail and white for the right rail. Thus, all the red wires to the left side of the terminal and all the white to the right side.

I first thought of this approach when trying to wire up all the tracks in my roundhouse to the bus. The terminals also come in handy should you create a short as you can unscrew a feeder to pinpoint the problem instead of unsoldering from the main bus.

Hope this helps as this would be very easy to explain with a picture but slightly harder for me to explain in text.

[claycts]

BIG advantage of a terminal strip is the ability to CHANGE a wire, unscre, screw insyead of cut and solder. Strip are good for any application in DCC. Want to hook up multipel items PUT THEM UNDER ONE SCREW. Yes DC or DCC terminal strips are great and SAFE since the screw is recessed and very hard to bridge and cause a short. Look on line there are electronics houses that hadve up to 24 place strips. I buy 8 ckt and 4 ckt in bulk for $.50 each.