First a bit of background: my layout is very much in the beginning stages. A bit of track on the main level is in. Power feeders have not yet been run and turnouts are held in open or closed positions by pushpins.
All weekend my wife was telling my nephew and his girlfriend about my layout. The girlfriend who is barely 20 thought MY HOBBY sounded really cool.
This morning I got the chance to show them the layout. I turned on track power, acquired my favorite steam loco, hit the horn and NOTHING!! In fact much to my horror nothing on the main level had power and I had no idea why.
They politely admired the rest of my work and we headed back upstairs. A little while later I got 5 minutes to sneak back down. I grabbed my multimeter only to discover a dead battery and no replacements. I was pretty well deflated.
Fast forward 6 hours, the company has left.... I was looking for something else when I found the 9 volt batteries that had eluded me this morning. A new battery and two minutes with the meter and I discovered a switch with the push pin removed allowing the points to drift away from the main rail - no power.
As I said it is a work in progress and there will be feeders but for now it made for a pretty embarrassing story...
- Bill Rutherford Lancaster, NH
Central Vermont Railroad
I've had my share of head-scratching while laying my original Shinohara track and wiring the feeders. All of the turnouts were power-routing. I had to keep chanting the idiom.
ALL feeders must be at the point end of turnouts and ALL frog-to-frog rails must be gapped.
A big takeaway about feeder wiring is, TEST Frequently! Sometimes after doing a marathon wiring session I would encounter an undecipherable short. Realizing I had just wired maybe two dozen feeders I had to go back and trace each one plus check every rail gap to be sure none had mysteriously closed up.
Those were the days
This helps:
https://dccwiki.com/Turnout
Cheers, Ed
Peco, but again, no fault of the turnout. Simply incomplete wiring....
I feed every aspect of a turnout, making them bullet proof. I also use tortoise motors so no closure issues - just haven't gotten that far yet on the main level, only on staging.
That combined with my good friend, Mr Murphy and failure was almost guaranteed! LOL
Kato also uses power routing turnouts. For me it was easy...power flows in the direction that the switches are thrown. I have no blocks whatsoever...My double ended passing sidings work well.
To eliminate the contact problems that will inevitability occur with power routing, I include a spdt in the mechanism that i use to throw the switches and feed-wire the moving parts and the frog.. That way my layout has to find other ways to embarrass me. Dan
I think you should marry that girl .
Simon
Oh shoot I thought it was the OPs girlfriend. I hope I didn't offend anyone!
No, all good! And yes I told him he should keep her.
The post was intended to be tongue in cheek. Fact is I am almost old enough to be her grandfather. Just laughing at the idea that a young woman found model railroading cool.
Sorry if anyone misunderstood.
It was a great story, Bill. Thanks for sharing.
Rich
Alton Junction
B Rutherford All weekend my wife was telling my nephew and his girlfriend about my layout. The girlfriend who is barely 20 thought MY HOBBY sounded really cool. This morning I got the chance to show them the layout. I turned on track power, acquired my favorite steam loco, hit the horn and NOTHING!! In fact much to my horror nothing on the main level had power and I had no idea why.