Hi all,

I have never used wide radius turnouts before, but on my new layout I have installed one 22175 wide radius turnout. I have found in digital operation almost all of my digital locks stall when crossing this turnout (lights off, no power). Is this a common problem? Or do I have a defective turnout? Or just a lot of picky locos? I have tried shimming the track in various ways, but no luck. If a loco is going fast enough it will slide over the dead spot (fairly fast). It seems to be when they hit the two "fake" plastic pukos in the middle of the turnout.

Some locs that stall:

3604 BR80 steam Tank Engine
3686 PtL 2/2 Glaskasten
30050 BR23
30210 V200
36120 Thomas
36826 Kof
37140 BR89.70-75
39646 BR64

Locs that don't stall:

36080 V80

The only pattern I notice is that V80 uses a shorter slider (I think)....

I can rework the geometry to use a standard turnout here, but it will be a little ugly. I also may be able to help the contact with a piece of solid copper wire simulating an additional puko. I just wanted to see if anyone else had see this before.

Thanks,

-Brandon

Edited by user 09 October 2013 16:39:22(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Hi all,
Brandon,I posted this time and time again,.....

It is a contact problem with rails they ARE NOT connected(in the turnouts) to any ground.These small locs do not have any feed.

Eeessh!

Dr D




p.s. It is also a ballast issue as these smaller loks are not heavy enough,....

Sounds similar to passenger car lights flickering across turnouts. I traced those down to bad contact with the rails, not the third rail. Stalling is almost always bad ground connections, not bad third rail connections. With the passenger cars, the fix was to add a second ground connection on the other truck set. As Martin and Kbvrod suggest, you may be able to fix this on K track by making sure all rails are properly grounded. My passenger car issue was with M track that uses plastic rails for some parts so the slider will not close across the diverging rail and the third rail, causing a short. This I could not fix with a simple grounding jumper. For my small lokos that stalled on the turnouts, I installed the ESU 54670 powerpack. This provides .5 second of power to bridge these bad track ground connections. As you can't add more ground connections to the small lokos, it is the only solution. You must also have a V4 ESU decoder though too.

If you ever have a contact issue with older loks, one little trick that you can do as part of testing is to remove the slider and reinstall it 180 degrees reversed. Sometimes, the sliders can wear and this can cause occasional contact problems. Reversing the slider changes the pressure points and if the problem goes away, the solution may be to replace the slider. This can also be detected if the lok seems to have problems when moving in one direction only and if the lok is rotated, the problem is less evident or absent.

The newer loks with soldered wires or new clip designs may not be easily reversed, so this test may not work in those cases.

Regards

Mike C

So you are suggesting that the ESU powerpack in the case of creating a .5 second bridge will only work with the V4 ESU decoder?
- Mark

Hello all,

I've done some testing, and I have an update and solution. I tested with analog operation, and as expected the results were exactly the same. Smallish locos like 3312 (T5), 3141 (260), etc stalled. Larger locks like 3096 (BR86), 3084 (BR50) and 3075 (216) had no problem.

I tested with a voltmeter and found that some of the center studs were not working in the turnout. In this photo, the red oval are "fake" plastic" pukos, and the green oval is where the pukos had no power.


(larger: Click here)

You may have noticed the copper wire in the previous picture. I happened to have a positive/B (+) feeder right next to this turnout, which made testing faster. I put the copper wire in to augment the pukos that were not getting power. After this, every loco runs over this track perfectly at any speed. However, it doesn't look great.



Here's a loco (3312) running over the copper wire. It creates enough contact to skip the dead section (and lifts the pickup show far enough):



In the end, I removed the jumper, and lifted the turnout to check the underside. After lifting it/twisting it around and pressing the layers together, the turnout works without the copper wire (basically, works as it should). I am not sure if it was the lifting/twisting that seated it correctly, or if it was the pressure from the copper wire during driving tests...but it now works without the copper wire.

-Brandon

Many 3 rail marklinister wanted to use underground motor to simulate like realism.
Why don´t Marklin just change K turnouts in better shape?
Just take look at C turnouts.
Underground motor and nice details for turnouts lighting...etc!

Hi Brandon,

Thanks for showing this.

Brgds - Lasse

Kevin,

Good idea, I'll make sure to do it.

-Brandon

Hi all,

I should have mentioned in my previous post, I tested by getting a loco stuck. I connected a ground lead and touched it to each of the outer rails, then touched the loco wheels directly. No movement. I then connected a solid copper lead to the + side, and carefully reached through and touched the pickup shoe, at which point the loco came alive. I wrapped some tape around the copper lead so I wouldn't hit the outer rail reaching through to touch the pickup shoe. This was done with a sturdy locomotive (3312 once again).

-Brandon

Interesting. When you said it was your small lokos, I thought for sure it would be a bad ground. So loko length had no real cause, it was the length of the slider and wether it would bridge across the dead center rail.

The issue here seems to be that the three pukos at the switch end of the track were not getting power for some reason. I am guessing that the track may have been bent, dropped or otherwise damaged and the thin metal plate which acts as conductor must no longer make proper contact with the piece that has the pukos on it. I have never seen this issue before on a switch track. The only problem that I had seen with these switches was an issue with the little movable piece where the inner (straight) and outer (curved) rails meet.
I am happy that you solved it. Hopefully you won't need the copper wiring anymore, because that looks like it will cause wear and tear on the sliders when used.

Regards

Mike C

Brandon,

Murphy will just wait for you to ballast that switch! I would do a permanent fix or discard it - but that's just me ;-)

-Tom