Found another British woman, model railroader and youtuber, Jenny Kirk. Britain has been having unusual snow and cold this past week.
Her indoor layout has a hatch to her garden layout. If she said she is running dead rail, I missed it. How is this not a short circuit?
Henry
COB Potomac & Northern
Shenandoah Valley
Snow is not that great of a conductor. Water isn't super awesome either, unless it's salt water.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
If Randy says so, it must be true. I thought I remembered a thread where someone had a short, when his new ballast was still wet. I won't be sending any of my DCC locos out in the snow to prove it can be done.
I just watched a couple of her videos, and scrolled through the comments to see what people were asking.
One of the responders said that snow and water doesn't have an affect with 12v DC.
Mike.
My You Tube
I've seen wet ballast trip block detectors. I guess anything further depends on how the glue was thinned and the type of ballast material.
I'm not ALWAYS right, but tthere have been enough videos of large scale trains plowing snow that if it shorted the track, at least some of them would have halted in their tracks. Some have wedge plows, but I've seen some with working rotaries, too.
Rain would have to really flood the track - and that's why there's ballast, to keep that from happening, forget shorts, if the water accumulates that much, it's washing your track away. And rainwater would tend to be too pure to conduct much. There's a guy on Youtube, Electroboom, who often shocks himself, or appears to shock himelf - DO NOT attempt to replicate what he's doing unless you REALLY understand why it works and isn;t as dangerous as it looks - actually, don;t do it regardless. But there's one where he has 2 electrodes in a big jar of water, and he only gets a shock if he moves too close to one of the rods. Sort of blows away the idea of tossing a toaster in someone's bath as a way to electrocute them, unless you toss it right on top of the person.
As for snow - even if it does short the rails, what's the first thing that happens in a short circuit? Heat is generated. What happens when snow gets warm? Ever clean track, or slot car track, with steel wool (DON'T!)? A fiber here or there gets snagged and shorts the track. Until you turn on the power - at which point it shorts for a fraction of a second and the stray bit simply melts, usually before any circuit breaker in the power pack can even kick in. 9V batter and a clump of steel wool - good fire starter for the woods, until the battery goes dead or you run out of steel wool.
I used to run G scale trains in the rain all the time. Had a ten-amp, 24 volt power supply.
Current draw was a little higher on "wet" days, especially if there were wet leaves and grass across the rails. I had to clean most of those off anyway.
G scale engines mostly used "motor blocks" totally enclosed motor, gear, axle sets. They weren't completely waterproof but they didn't seem to be affected by too much water. I've taken them apart years later and there was only a little corrosion in them.
Regards, Ed
Back in my farming days, use of an electric fence loss alot of ''shock'' value due to animals standing on snow.
As said above snow is more of insulation then you would think
Snow is fairly dry. Rain is wet. However rain water doesn’t really conduct electricity. It the dirt and minerals in water that conduct electricity. Unless you bathe in distilled water I wouldn’t toss a toaster or a hair dryer into the tub. Tap water is full of minerals. And of course there have been plenty of deaths caused by swimming pool lights.
If they are g scale then remote control wireless battery is the answer. besides wet conditions dont have to cleannthe track either. I see o scale commonly run outside.
My guess is that it iscold and dry enough that the snow isnt melting to cause a problem. My biggest fear in smaller scales would be the snow breaking details.
A pessimist sees a dark tunnel
An optimist sees the light at the end of the tunnel
A realist sees a frieght train
An engineer sees three idiots standing on the tracks stairing blankly in space
Nice thing is, G is plenty big enough to have high capacity batteries on board, which is why dead rail operations have been a thing for garden railroads for years now.
No chance of anyone getting electrocuted in my pool - there are 4 lights, but they are all fiber optics. The box sits on my patio, safely away from the pool, and only bundles of fiber optics go to the pool. As a bonus, there is a color wheel in the box so I can make it all one color or constantly change. New ones use low voltage LEDs in the same way.
---Randy
My large scale is a combination of dead rail and live rail right now. Those batteries are expensive. So i build into certain cars battery banks and the wireless reciever. The locomotives are rewired accordingly. Allowing me to run them on battery. But not have to equip ever one with the electonics and batteries. My g scale is more for the fun of just running trains outside on nice days, not so much railroad operations. I have the ho layout for that.
I would think do to ho small size, snow could easily get packed into the trucks stopping movement and derail it. If not working into the shell itself causing issues.
Wolfie
There was an article in '74 or '75 in Railroad Modeler about a guy who built an outdoor N scale (!) model of an open-pit copper mine into a natural hillside in his Southern California back yard. You know that whole "it never rains in Southern California" song? Yeah, not so much. DAYS after he completed it, most of it was washed away.
Are the batteries really that expensive? At one point they were using ones similar to what my RC car used in the 80's, since if it could run a 40 amp RC car motor for 15 minutes, it could run a 2 amp train for 4 hours or more. They weren't cheap, like going to buy a plain old D battery, but not so expensive my poor college student self couldn't afford a couple of them so I could just keep the car running.