Gas Man rrI'm going to bulid a 24Lx18w 2 lanes layout can I use lamp wire to wire it.
i'm sure you can. I assume you must have a lot of it laying around.
but lamp card is made to be flexible. The lamp cord i've seen has finely standed wire and the insulation that is soft and bulky. I'm not sure how easy it will be to add feeders to it or use typical connectors.
greg - Philadelphia & Reading / Reading
LION suggests using 14ga Solid wire. Glamp one end in a vice and use a knife to cut off the insulation. You will then have two bare conductors. staple them about 6" apart, 12" + is better. You can solder drops wherever you need them.
ROAR
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I use #18 wire for my track bus, and it works fine. My layout is T-shaped. The longest bus wire run is about 20 feet. I only run a few locomotives at a time.
You will need to tap into the wire a lot for feeders. Because of that, I would recommend separate wires, or separate the two conductors so they become separate wires.
The standard recommendation is #14 or even #12 wire. You might go with #14 to be on the safe side for your track bus. The lamp cord would be fine for structure lighting, street lamps and the like.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
I agree with Dave on going larger for your bus wiring if for DCC, if that's in your plans. But for most everything else, lamp wire works pretty good, is cheap, and readily available.
When I built the current layout, DCC was way off on the horizon for me. So I did plan on eventually converting, although I did not pull bus wires until I was ready to convert. Having lots of blocks wired in for DC makes troubleshooting on DCC a breeze, since you can easily isolate where a short is by turning off blocks until you find the culprit.
A lot of my wiring within individual blocks does use 18 gauge lamp wire. Keep in mind that lamp wire is also available in 16 gauge and that's what I used for the primary power distribution to the blocks. These 16 gauge lines were then cut short and soldered into the 12 gauge bus when it was added.
Mike Lehman
Urbana, IL
Lamp wire is usually 18 gauge. Assuming you run plenty of feeders to the rails that would be on the light side but should work for a DC layout, but 18 gauge is likely far too light for a DCC layout unless it is very small, except perhaps for the feeders that go from the bus wire to the track itself (although not many guys like to use stranded wire for that purpose regardless of gauge). The bus wires should be very heavy perhaps 12 gauge on a DCC layout.
Dave Nelson
I'm going to bulid a 24Lx18w 2 lanes layout can I use lamp wire to wire it.