Hi all, the other thread about point power promts this one. i have tortoises that have the power on all the time, but i was wondering why the power has to be on all the time??especially if you use peco turnouts with the over centre spring to keep the blade to the rail?? when i power off, the points stay where they are, and the spring wire only has enough 'spring' to back the tortoise motors gear train back a little bit, but not enough to affect frog switching. even with a shinahara point i would expect the spring wire to hold the blade in place too as that resistance should be less than whats needed to back the tortoises gear train up. the question mark would only be on hand built stuff where the blades are sprung to the middle position. i was also thinking that if using DCC you used a lenz LS150 in slow motion motion mode and set the time on to the max of 10 seconds it should be long enough to throw the point and when the LS150 power stops it should stay where it is ok. this way you could run as many tortoises as you want off just one wall wart supply that can power the 150's and maybe 4 or 5 motors at once. the only down side being that you couldn't use the constant polarity to the motor to switch the lights on a mimic panel.
With free-pivoting commercial turnouts, they DON'T have to be on all the time. Actualyl the slow motion effect gets defeated byt he Peco springs, usually those get removed when using Tortoises. At any rate, there is sufficient resistence in the gear train to hold the points in position without power. However with handlaid continuous point rail turnouts, where there is no hinge, you are fighting the tendency of the rail to want to spring back. In smaller rail codes this still usually isn't enough to force back a Tortoise, but with heavier rail and sharper frog number turnouts it muight not be enough. Friend of mine does Code 40 N scale and his Tortoises work jsut fine with the LS150. 10 seconds is bad though - while the timeout is in effect the LS150 won;t accept any other turnout commands! We discovered this early on, luckily not when a train was rolling and w could have had an oops. Went back and set them all for about 2 seconds.
It's not a huge deal though - Tortoise motors draw so little power it's no big deal to keep them powered. A 1 amp power supply is good for well over 50 Tortoises.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
thanks for that Randy, i was wondering if the LS150 was suitable for tortoise motors as the power is normally on all the time, and this isn't an option with the 150?? unless it was used to fire relays that do the actual power routing to the tortoises, but that sort of defeats the cheapness of the 150.