Track and electrical/DCC
what causes riveted points to stop conducting?
I spent some of this afternoon wrestling with turnouts (almost all Atlas) that have riveted points that have stopped conducting electricity. These turnouts have all been in place for a considerable period of time, generally ranging from about 6-7 years to 30+ years. I have had to work on maybe 8-10 of them in the past few weeks. There are another 15 or so. Are they just ticking away, waiting to fail too?
1992 Walthers SW1 motor info
Hi all,
I have a friend that wants me to install a sound decoder in a 1992 Walthers SW1.
I am trying to find out if anybody has done this?
My real concern is finding out if the motor is wired similar to the old Athearn blue box locomotives that have it so you need to isolate the motor like Athearn.
Thanks,
Barry
Driving a 130' diamond scale HO turntable with an arduino and a stepper motor
A few years ago I purchased a partially completed 130' Diamond Scale turntable with the intention of putting in the Bear Creek yard engine facility on my BC&SJ railroad.
Finally, I'm in the process of installing it. The plan is to drive it with a stepper motor and an Arduino.
Sounds simple? Well not so much actually.
Due to my being lucky I have a good friend (and layout collaborator) who can make adaptor fittings to go between stepper motors and the 3/16" worm gear driveshaft for the turntable.
First FastTracks turnout
I just finished building my very first turnout using FastTracks jig. I've been wanting to try to build my own turnout for ages and I've read and watched a ton of videos how to do it. I was lucky enough to borrow a jig to try it out before having to invest in something that I may not enjoy. It's not pretty, and yes I made plenty of mistakes and learned a ton actually building one and it works great!
Here are some initial thoughts being the first one I built.
Sound for Union Pacific M-10000
I know that Con-cor sells a Digitrax sound decoder for the HO scale M-10000. Are there any other decoders and/or sound files available for the Winton 191A motor?
What does the Con-cor decoder sound like? Is there anything better?
Super Elevation on HO curves
If I used blue masking tape to create super elevation, how many layers would be needed for HO?
Code 40 rail in HO
What pound rail would be code 40 in HO?
Would a Mikado like this go on a siding with this pound rail?
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Atlas Signal System and JMRI
I have the layout wired into blocks with BD20's and the tortoise switch machines wired into the DCC bus, so the next phase will be adding signals.
There are a number of options out there but the Atlas Interlock and signal control boards seem to be the most readily available ones. Ideally I am envisioning all the signals to display red until the dispatcher lines up a train. Is it possible to use the Atlas signal control boards with JMRI?
stationary decoders - order dependent?
Stationary decoders are typically used for things like turnout control via DCC. For example, I have a bunch of turnouts on my layout that are controlled by NCE SwitchIt8's. They work very well.
My question is about ordering on the DCC bus. I have two SwitchIt8's, and they are wired on the end of my DCC control bus. That is, command station -> booster -> booster -> SwitchIt8 -> SwitchIt8. If I were to rewire this so that the last SwitchIt8 were moved to the front of the line between the command station and the booster, would the addresses etc get messed up?
Atlas flex track revisions
Here is a comparison of the rail profile of code 83 from a few years back:
You can see the Atls code 83 has a lousy profile.
I ordered a couple boxes of Atlas code 100 for staging, where appearance isn't important. There were some IMO major improvements in the newer revised Atlas code 100. I'll see if I can get some comparison photo's shortly.
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