Hello everyone, i was wondering.....With the Peco Electrofrog turnouts, do most of you guys use them with just the insulated rail joiners or is it more advisable to actually do the "Modification" to them by snipping the wire to the wing rail and soldering power feeders to the stock rail and points? I am running DCC and plan on using 2 reverse loops. I am in the process of replacing all of my current #6 Atlas Custom turnouts with Peco #8 Large Radius turnouts and i dont want to mess them up or get them installed and wish i had either converted them or vise versa......Any help or suggestions is appreciated.....Thanks!
In addition to snipping the jumpers, you want to add the other jumpers connecting the closure rails/point rails to the stock rails. ANd then you need to pwoer the frog som eway, like contacts on your switch motors, or a Frog Juicer. Tam Valley does say with the Frog Juicer you don;t have to actually cut the jumpers to use a Frog Juicer, they will work fine as-is.
This is in ADDITION to isolating the diverging rails - it doesn;t matter if you cut the jumpers or not, the insulated joiners, or gaps cut in the rail past the frog, are always needed. They don't have to be right at the turnout, they just have to be before any additional feeders.
If you just use them as-is, no from power, you are relying on point to stock rail contact to power the closure rails and all through the frogs. IE, not reliable long term.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
Thanks Randy, as for directions out there on the web, is there any paticular video or person that does is correctly and makes it fairly easy to understand? Thanks again!
rrinker If you just use them as-is, no from power, you are relying on point to stock rail contact to power the closure rails and all through the frogs. IE, not reliable long term.
Rich
Alton Junction
Here's the wiring for a Peco Electrofrog
http://www.wiringfordcc.com/switches_peco.htm#a2
If you leave it as-is and just gap the rails, both point rails will have the same polarity, which is the problem with the old SHinharas. If you clip the jumpers that come on the turnout (the ones marked cut jumpers on the diagram) and add the other ones (the Code 83 turnouts at least have gaps in the ties to add these jumpers - it's also recommended to make them feeders) then you have a completely reliable turnout. If you don;t, the only power to the closure rails and frog comes from the point rail touching the stock rail. One grain of ballast, or getting paint in there while painting the rail, and there's no power. The other advantage of doing this is that the entire frog becomes one polarity or the other, so there is no change of any sort of shorting going over the frog, anythign a wheel could POSSIBLY touch is all the same polarity, so no shorts can occur.
Randy, thanks for those additional comments. I was just looking for an easy way out for our OP who concedes that he is a novice when it comes to the Electrofrog. When I was faced with a similar decision between the Electrofrog and the Insulfrog on my new layout, I went with the Insulfrog. True, the frog is dead but that didn't bother me and the Insulfrog required no special wiring or gapping.