Thanks Randy, pretty much what I thought on both questions. Just wanted reassurance. The working area of my hidden staging yard under my layout is pretty cramped, so I want to do things just once! Thanks.
Has to go downstream, on the oiutput side of the AR-1, otherwise the current draw of the AR-1 itself will result in the block showing occupied at all times.
Wire for the block doesn;t matter, but if it needs to loop through the detector (pass through the donut hole twice), stranded wire would be easier to work with. Not the bus wires for the dectection sections don;t have to be as heavy as the main power bus - at least if you locate the block detectors near the block they are detecting. You will only be powering a short section of track with each one - so you run the heavy wiere all around the layout, and where you gap the rails for the detection sections, you tap off this main bus, go through the detector, and connect to the feeders for that detection section, which is probably just a few. Alternately, you cna run even smaller than normal wire through the detector donut hole, and use havier wire on either side of it as the bus - a short stretch of thinner wire will not drop enough voltage to matter. For one, there won;t be a lot of trains in one detection block (unless people ignore the nice signal system you went through the trouble to set up), so the current draw will be small, and second, a short length of wire, just enough to wrap in the detector and then connect to the bus wires, won;t have much resistence, Example - for a given wire size and load, say the size wire you are using would drop 2 volts over 100 feet. Using just 1 foot of that wire to connect the detector would be only a .02V drop, all else being equal. Not even noticable.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
i'm about ready to wire a reversing loop, using an AR-1 and a Team Digital BD22 for block (track) detection. My questions: does the BD22 go downstream of the AR-1, upstream, or doesn't matter? My guess would be downstream. Also, for the Team digital BD22 and also a BlocD8, what works better, solid wire or stranded (or either)? Thanks all.