A few years ago I added to my Digitrax Empire Builder set by adding a second booster and power manager. This divides the layout into 4 separate power districts. One booster controls district 1&2. The second booster controls district 3&4, which then goes through a PM42 power manager to the track. A short immediately developed when crossing power districts between the two boosters. I do have one leg of a turning wye controlled by an AR1 automatic reverser. Digitrax Tech Support has had me do troubleshooting such as reversing the wire to the rail A/B terminals on one of the boosters and eliminating a contigous reversing section in district two, which is where the AR1 is installed in the wye. This corrected the majority of the issues which I was testing with only two engines. After putting all of the locomotives back on the layout the short circuits returned at random times. These engines are not sitting over switches or crossing power district gaps. If I start removing them randomly the short clears. Start running trains and the short reappears. Nothing I`ve done seems to correct the problem and I`m beginning to wonder if there is something wrong with the power manager. Does anyone have any fix for this?
Sincerely,
Patrick
to the Forums.
Are you certain that it is a SHORT and not a loss of continuity? Almost any time our trains stop, someone calls it a short, when in fact it could be a loss of power. Make sure that your locomotive wheels are clean, and the track is clean also.
You will need to get a good digital multimeter if you are going to do any kind of troubleshooting. Shorts are one of the hardest things to find. In some cases to find a short, you simply have to disconnect one wire at a time untill it goes away.
One of the first things I would do is disconnect the AR unit. Then mark all of the gaps for your power districts and reversing section. I use colored push pins for this.
1- Then, with the layout powered on, take your meeter and measure the AC voltage on the track, ON THE SAME RAIL. Keep the probes about a foot apart and go along the track sliding both of them along. The reading should be zero volts. As soon as you cross a gap where the track polarity changes, the reading will jump to 13 volts or so. That will indicate a change in polarity at that point, and that the new section of track on the layout needs to have the track wiring to that section reversed.
2- Another thing to look for is around the turnouts. If you use ElectroFrog type turnouts that have live frogs, and do not have gaps, or you have not cut gaps, at the ends of the Frogs, this could be the problem.
3- Also check to make sure there is no voltage on the track betwwen the two rails in the reversing section, as there may be a sneak path that you may not know about.
I would start by checking the above three things first. Then hook up the auto reverser again and check the track within its boundarys for any differences in poarity as you did in No 1 above.
Elmer.
The above is my opinion, from an active and experienced Model Railroader in N scale and HO since 1961.
(Modeling Freelance, Eastern US, HO scale, in 1962, with NCE DCC for locomotive control and a stand alone LocoNet for block detection and signals.) http://waynes-trains.com/ at home, and N scale at the Club.
If you are having this problem with no trains running, and it goes away when you "randomly" remove a few locomotives, I think you may be seeing an overload, not a short. They may look the same, particularly when the "short" light goes on.
How many locomotives are you talking about? Are they sound engines? Are you also running lighted passenger cars, or a lot of other things like stationary decoders off your DCC system?
I don't use those particular devices, but another possibility is that you've got the trip current set very low, which would also look like an overload.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
have you put a ground wire from the booster case to booster case? just checking.
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Thank you for the reply. I`ve got some serious troubleshooting to do.
Nice railroad by the way. Saw your site.
I am running sound equipped locomotives. Probably 6 engines at a time.
Have you matched the voltage on the two boosters?
My system is NCE, but I did something similar to what you have done a little back by dividing my layout into 8 separate power districts and adding a second booster, so that each booster controlled 4 power districts.
I began to notice a momentary (not dead) short every time that a locomotive crossed from one booster district to the other booster district. The problem was that my original booster had a voltage output of 15.3, and the second booster had an output voltage of 13.6. Once I matched the voltage outputs, the momentary shorts went away.
Rich
Alton Junction
Rich,
How do you match the voltage between boosters?
There should be an adjustment inside the case. The manual should tell you how. (I have NCE) If you can't find anything in the manual, try the Digitrax website for the information.
First the obvious, there is a scale switch on the front of the DB150 and DCS100 which sets the basic track voltage. Make sure all booster and the command station are set tot he same scale, if one is on N/Z scale and the rest are on HO, there's a nearly 3 volt difference. Or if one is on O/G scale, it's going to be about 5 volts higher than the HO setting.
If those match and there is more than a half to one volt difference between districts, also check the power supplies feeding them. This still doesn;t fix it, there is a potentiometer under the hood to do fine tuning. There's a tech support depot article on the Digitrax site that shows where this is.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
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