Damaged Inner Frog Rail on Peco Insulfrog Turnout

[richhotrain]

In building my new layout, I installed Peco Insulfrog turnouts with the spring installed for manual throwing of the point rails. Since I was not going to use a switch motor like a Tortoise for signalling purposes, I needed a way to wire up the signals.

Randy provided a solution which was to gap the ends of the inner frog rails and the matching ends of the stock rails. Then, I wired all four gapped rails to the trackside signals. Having kept the power routing feature by gapping the inner frog rails, manual flipping of the points produced the desired results with the trackside signals. 

Now, more recently, I ballasted the track and all of the signals still work fine - - except for the signals controlled by one of the turnouts. On that particular turnout, the signals work correctly when the divergent route is selected. But when the straight through route is selected, none of the affected signals light. Since they worked before, I assumed that ballasting was the issue. But everything looked fine.

So, I checked all of the rail segments for power taking into account the power routing feature. Turns out, there is no power on the straight through frog rail beyond the frog. There is power on the closure rail, so I moved the common wire from the inner frog rail to the closure rail and now everything works fine.

So, my question is, could ballasting have somehow damaged the inner frog rail?  As I previously mentioned, it all worked fine before ballasting, so I cannot understand what went wrong. 

Any thoughts?

Rich

[Doughless]

I'm not qualified to speak about wiring in general, definitely not about the wiring structure of Peco turnouts or your modification, but have you considered the possibility that when ballasting, the diluted glue mixture somehow worked its way into an electrical contact point and interfered with contact along the tangent route.

Sounds like everything has been rewired and soldered, so glue working its way in between the contacts seems remote. 

[mlehman]

Rich,

I suspect you had a cold or loose solder joint the first time. So long as it was there undisturbed, it might have originally touched enough to work. Once the glue came down, that tiny crack absorbed it by capillary action and opened the circuit that previously worked. Once you resoldered and had a good solder joint, all was OK.

[richhotrain]

Thanks, Douglas and Mike, for your replies.

One thing I recall since posting this thread is that when I first noticed the absence of lights on a facing signal, as a locomotive rode over the turnout, the light blinked on and off. But now it is permanently off. So, I am suspecting a damaged frog rail. 

I should mention that all of the Peco Insulfrog turnouts were new when installed on the layout. So, I am really thinking that the turnout was damaged out of the package when I first installed it, but now it has totally failed.

Rich. 

[rrinker]

 I would suspect some sort of intermittant connection, based on it blinking before, and now that everything is ballasted, the glue got in the loose connection and is now fully insulating it.

                              - -Randy

 

[richhotrain]

rrinker

 I would suspect some sort of intermittant connection, based on it blinking before, and now that everything is ballasted, the glue got in the loose connection and is now fully insulating it.

                              - -Randy 

Thanks, Randy. That makes sense to me. Since everything is now working correctly, I am just going to have to live with it because I am in no mood to take out and replace the existing turnout.

Rich