Favourite Photos...

Favourite Photos...
Reading Lines GP35 #3647

Middletown, Pa

Sunday 29 March 2015

Two Birds with One Stone...

So as part of moving forward with the detection system I've decided to do a little maintenance on all of our turnouts as we install the associated wiring.

Predominately the layout turnouts are all PECO Code 83 with a few Walthers - Shinohara's thrown in.  Now that we are going to be detecting all of the mainline turnouts, one of the issues with detecting them is that they need to be their own isolated block and require power from one of the sixteen (16) BDL detection circuits & a common return.

To accomplish this I need to wire small feeders onto the turnouts themselves, this is actually a good thing on two levels.  Firstly its actually relatively easy with the PECO turnouts as they have a small gap in the middle that you can place the feeders to serve as jumpers between the point rail and the outside stock rail.


Secondly this eliminates PECO's only real flaw with their turnouts, and that being that the remaining rails are fed power from the tip of the point rail when normally powered from another section of track prior to the points.  This addition eliminates that issue and almost makes these turnouts bulletproof.



I've discussed this recently with others as to why PECO didn't factory install the jumpers in the first place, I know cost would be the reason, but it would make the reliability (not that it's not there know) so much better.

The finished PECO turnout with jumper soldered in position:




The Walthers Shinoharas are the same too, although these turnouts already have the jumper strip installed it is not a very strong bond.  When soldering the feeders to these they often break, so the best method is to remove them and solder the feeder proper to the bottom of the rail.



When I solder the jumpers onto these I remove the plastic tie that the jumper sits in (as it melts) and again like the PECO's solder it across the bottom of rail.

More soon.

Jas...

No comments:

Post a Comment