Hello all, I am in the construction phase of my layout and will begin laying track tomorrow. The details are as follows:
Dimensions: 1' 8" D x 8' W
I am using Bachmann EZ Command Control
It is a small switching layout, the plan as it sits on my layout currently is exactly as it is shown in the 2006 Model Railroad Planning (page 84). But in the future I will be expanding it to include an engine servicing facility on the lower portion of the benchwork.
In the lower drawing, the plan that I am using is on the bottom.
My question is this: How many connections will I need, and where?
What I was thinking of doing was to have a feeder wire run to each of the spurs, the runaround tracks, the mainline, and the interchange track... that way each rail has its own feeder... Is this a good idea or overkill on such a small layout?
Thanks in advance for all your help!
Sam
May He bless you, guide you, and keep you safe on your journey through life!
I Model the New Hope & Ivyland RR (Bucks County, PA)
Sam,
Your plan is not overkill. Taking short cuts on wiring will come back to haunt. My own preferenc on feeders is to solder a pair to every piece of rail that is not soldered to a rail that has feeders. Also no more than 3 feet apart. That may be overkill, but most of the issues on these forums are due to insufficient feeders. I've yet to see a problem that was caused by too many feeder wires.
Martin Myers
Sam -
I am in the process of building my second layout and have never had a problem with current/signal loss when I ran a pair of feeders to each section of track. On spurs, no matter what the length, I will solder two pairs of feeders just for safety sake. Two pair on a spur may be a bit overkill but if/when one of the feeders gets knocked off and I don't notice it, there are no problems.
Ideally you would like to run a feeder to each and every section of track, so that you'd still have good power if every railjoiner on the layout stopped conducting electricity. That's probably over kill. If you go with the single fault theory (things fail one at a time) then things would be good if only ONE railjoiner failed to conduct. Under this scheme you only need run a feeder to every OTHER piece of track. The pieces of track without feeders have rail joiners at BOTH ends, so they have power even if a single railjoiner stops conducting electricity.
If you use flex track, each piece is 3 feet long, so you can get from one end of the layout to the other with only three pieces of track. If you ran feeders to the far left end of the track and then the far right end, you could skip a feeder to the middle piece, cause the middle gets fed by two sets of rail joiners and it is unlikely for both of them to fail. In fact, new rail joiners, properly installed and nice and tight, are pretty reliable.
Spurs are fed from turnouts. Some turnouts are power routing, they kill power to the deselected route. This tends to confuse me, I kinda expect power all the time. I'd make sure I had a feeder on each side of every turnout and on both routes thru the turnout. That way you have power all the time. Also I don't really trust the power routing feature, it involves using the points of th turnout as electrical switches and if you think rail joiners are undependable, then well, points are a whole bunch worse.
Since you are going with DCC, you don't have to arrange switches to kill power on spurs. With DCC a locomotive will stay put on a spur until the throttle tells it to move. That doesn't work on DC, you would need additional switches to permit you to park locomotives on spurs while you run other locomotives on the main. A benefit of DCC.
David Starr www.newsnorthwoods.blogspot.com
Thank you for your input guys! I appreciate you taking the time to answer my question!
All three of you have basically told me that I am on the right track (no pun intended). So the only thing I'm not going to add feeders to are the switches, I don't want to risk messing those up...
Thanks again!