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Used Track Power Issues


FURKASoCal
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I recently acquired about 100 feet of very weathered track from a friend and started an outdoor layout for the first time. The track is all LGB 100% brass and had been sitting outside for quite a while and was in poor condition. After some considerable cleaning I now have largely smooth and trouble free operations except for a few bad sections. I measured in a few places around the track and despite being fed from only one location I have very little voltage drop around the layout. My current issues are mostly visible at night when the lights on the cars flicker in some spots and occasionally the locomotive will shudder in some sections. 

 

Should I consider soldering on some jumpers? if so What size wire should I use and what type of solder?

or

Should I consider running a main bus and feeders.If so what size wires should I used in this case? 

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated. 

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Personally, I would clean/polish the rail end/joint locations with a Dremel and use split-jaw direct to rail clamps. Then use something abrasive to clean/polish the rail top if there are areas that still need cleaning.   I wouldn't attempt to solder jumpers.

 

With only 100ft of track, if you eliminate the slider joiners and replace with direct-to-rail railclamps you won't have voltage drop or connection issues requiring feeders.

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I use a conductive grease after cleaning the rail ends and the bottom at the end also. Rail clamps are best, another feeder could help. I had some problem spots where I finally soldered a jumper. I drilled thru the rail to easily put the wire on , then solder.

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My layout which uses code 215 brass rail and code 250 with portions that have been out there since 1978. It needed bonding the rails to work with DCS and I,still had signal issues..., but I did manage to make it all work. However never mind the command of lights, smoke, horns, bell and station announcements it was never viable. Have returned to Aristocraft Train engeneer instead. Works fine no hastles. and keeps my sanity and my wallet in good shape.

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The DCS signal will travel good wherever the power travels well. There are limits to the amount of track and connectors to be used per channel. Brass track should be cleaned as well. Good track connections are a must. Brass connectors tend to corrode. So at least use conductive grease and maintain them.

 Also, there are a few rules with DCS to follow. Mainly you don't want the signal to double back on itself. A full loop of track should be electrically broken in at least one spot for this.

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Thanks Joe, thats something I have never tried. I didn't bond the track after it made the complete loop, but there is a rail joiner and I had tried conductive grease when I started experimenting with DCS. So this could be why I had so much trouble with DCS. I will try this as the weather permits later in the spring, by placing insulated railjoiners there instead. If it is this it would be great news as I enjoyed DCS tremendously but also was frustrated with all kinds of hastles, including frying boards. But that was entirely my fault. As I have kept my DCS set up its easy to plug it in make the modifications and test to see if its better this way.

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On 1/1/2018 at 1:22 PM, enginear joe said:

The DCS signal will travel good wherever the power travels well. There are limits to the amount of track and connectors to be used per channel. Brass track should be cleaned as well. Good track connections are a must. Brass connectors tend to corrode. So at least use conductive grease and maintain them.

 Also, there are a few rules with DCS to follow. Mainly you don't want the signal to double back on itself. A full loop of track should be electrically broken in at least one spot for this.

 

No, that is absolutely NOT true and not the case.  You do not want your loop broken in any locations with insulators.  I have proven this time and again in O gauge and in G scale that you want your loops in a single continuous oval and tune them from there.  Deployment and tuning is reliable and repeatable.  Anyone saying otherwise has not followed the guidelines as I have laid out.   I have all this information on my website on the guidelines.  

 

Video of deployment on 1600ft oval using Bridgewerks throttle power supply + TIU Rev L with PS2 engine.  (Using PS3 engine would have been better).  This loop required tuning and could have used additional drops on the far side of the layout (only had three).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Well Raymond that is exactly what I did for three or four years, except that I dont have the RevL as you know, but I still have very strange signal ratings (different ratings at every different time a loco goes around the layout to the same place!!!) plus very unreliable horn or bell, no positive control on the headlight markers etc. to speak of. My track is about a 160' ovals.... And I experience countless hastles with the way my pointwork is wired which makes blowing 5 amp fuses, a daily experience and sometimes up to 4 fuses in one afternoon!  But the worst is frying boards, there is absolutely no protection built in to them, so that when its fried it's about $125 + shipping to the US and back and on an A-B-A with two boards fried that could cost the price of the loco to get them changed... Absolutely unacceptable. MTH should replace them free of charge as it's their mistake if they don't fit the adequate protection on their boards.

 

Here more and more people are reacting to this programmed obsolescence in electronic products and having no protection on the DCS boards is deffinitly something I would place in that kind of category. But I appreciate all that you do to make it viable, you do more than MTH does. So this is not a thing against you in any way. Its also a generation thing, we were used to products that worked for near a lifetime, and this new electronic society is useless. You constantly have to replace things because of fried boards. Take for instance my furnace brand new, the best make in France - one thunder storm and the board fried: Cost 500€, thank god the insurance took it in.... No insurance for my MTH...

Happy new year though every body!

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What i have laid out is repeatable with no guess work required.  Situations where individuals still have problems is because there are key items that not being followed, ignored or think something is ok when it isn't. 

 

In your case one issue was/is rail joints/connections.  In our original discussions years ago I pointed out first thing I recommended was to ensure every single joint was solid and reliable.  My recommendation was and is always replace whatever you had (slider joiners/etc) at all rail joints with direct to rail clamps.  (and before doing that, clean the rail surfaces at those points first then install clamps).  I was told you direct soldered jumper wires on some/all places and could rest assured they would be reliable.  We spent a lot of time trying to troubleshoot and narrow things down.  I got a message months/years later that you found place(s) where the solder points had failed so there were in-fact breaks/bad continuity on the layout.  The bottom line was did not have solid/reliable connections around the layout and all the wonder and head-scratching was down to basic fundamental things that were missed.

 

160ft ovals are plenty small enough where you should have no problems.  To continue to have issues shows there are glaring issues that aren't MTH DCS related.  It's clear you still have unreliable rail joints on your layout.  Either that and/or you have damaged TIU channels from the shorts.  All of this we have covered long ago.

 

Blowing fuses as you noted due to the switches has to do with how the switches were designed and something you didn't want to change.  Blowing a fuse is something that is basic electrical and has nothing to do with the digital control system being used.   My recommendation to use fuses is to protect the equipment because the shorts were so serious and also ensure don't have engines on staging tracks that are left with track power applied take off without your knowledge.  It's not good to allow these kinds of shorts continue even with fuse protection.  

 

Frying boards was where engines were stored out of sight in doors where all these engines remained powered up when layout was in operation.  The shorts from the switch issue was causing voltage collapse on the layout so when power was quickly dropped and brought back up the engines stored were powering up in analog mode which is normal operation for PS2 engines under DC power.  Engines were running at track power in analog mode in a single place for an extended period of time.   It is also why should always have switches to cut power to staging tracks where engines not used are stored away and not visible. 

 

I have helped a lot of people and the situations and I see the same patterns.... the vast majority have their problems cleared up.  Those few that don't and have never ending problems is always because they say something is done and ok when it isn't: 

 

              - Say they have direct to rail clamps on all joints, when they don't.  (I'll see in a random photo of the layout months/years later where you see slider joiners instead of clamps when they swear all joints are clamped)

              - Say they have jumpers at the frogs that cut rail continuity when they don't. 

              - Say they have solid rail joint connections (when they aren't using direct to rail clamps) when they don't. 

              - Ignored other advise given

 

              - And in most cases usually some combination of all of the above.

 

It's always the same thing.  

 

I have personally used the same simple, repeatable process on large O gauge customer layouts and G scale layouts and it's rock solid reliable every time.  In one large O gauge deployment, customer hired a 'Certified Electrician' to wire it up and they had never ending problems.  I was hired in to figure it out and get it working.  I found feeder wires wired backwards creating random mystery short conditions, power supplies out of phase, transformers and TIUs all cross wired in ways that simply could not be believed.  But when you had conversations on the phone 'it was done by an Electrician and we have everything wired right"  when it clearly was not.  I spent a few days methodically checking everything and correcting problems, wired the layouts as i recommend, checked all track joints etc and they now have their large O gauge layout with 150ft ovals working perfectly. 

 

They thought it was MTH/DCS.  

 

It wasn't.

 

And this is how it is, process is so reliable and repeatable that when there are still issues, something is clearly missed.

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Well actually untill I stopped using DCS last year, I repeatedly and regularly checked the jumper wires on all rail joints (the entire two track 160 ' ovals are jumped) and resoldered any that were loose because I had found out that this did cause frustrating problems that weren't linked to DCS not functioning. I alsso had to resolder the resistors that you supplied me often, So on that count it can't be the cause. There are some wiring issues which could be cause for concearn: Like the fact that I have used household electric outlet plugs (of the continental type) to have a patch system where I can change over from DCS to analog because all of my other electrics that I had before aquiring MTH locos were using analog power. Of course this is an either one or the other system I never tried to use both at the same time. So this could have caused some signal feebleness, who knows?

However my pointwork is wired in the accepted system that has been dominant for all handlaid trackwork that I know of since the early 60s. So  I think that a new system like DCS should be compatible with it and not the other way round (Railroads in the US have to let ships pass under their bridges, because ships were there first!). I have been running DCS with cab control type togles in the indoor yard ever since the accident which you did repair very well, a few years ago. So there is now a safety procedure there and no more problems.  What actually tipped the bucket for me was that, when I opened up the railroad last spring, foolishly I didn't test by putting one engine on the inner track first to see which way it goes, and then putting it by hand on the outer track and check which way it goes. When my A-B-A lash up went over the crossovers it fried both boards. Especially since I repeatedly rearmed the circuit with a new  fuse and tried again; Its entirely my mistake Raymond. I am not blaming you or DCS about that. What I don't think is correct though is that those darn boards 1) don't have any protection against this. And 2) that they cost too much. Either they are fully protected and cost that price or they should cost less than ten bucks!

 Another factor that made me abandon DCS (not absolutly sure that it is definitive though...) was that I could MU my Lionel GP7 with my F3s in analog and could not in DCS (no flywheels on the Lionel); And another reason is that one of my buddies who is a star O gauge modeler in France quit O gauge and running at the world famous Rambolitrain museum, when they started to use digital (DCC) there just because he is fed up with the frustration when something goes wrong, and it often does. So you see most of the reasons have nothing to do with DCS, and much less your valuable help and advice which I have followed as much as I could. Also for me, the fun isn't in electronic wizzardry at all. So its better for me to stick with something I know and can master.

 I also was tired of all the procedures I had to observe with it and the maintenance it demands (those railjoint bonds for instance). But of course I miss the fantastic possibilities in switching wich DCS offers. And believe me when I did signal quality checks I could get a 9 in one point on one lap and a 3 on the next lap, in the exact same point of the layout - most perplexing. This is fact, not imagination.

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