Modifying points, Yes or No.

[FattishBoy]

Do any of you guy's modify your points, I am talking about adding the droppers to the point and bridging over from the stock rail to the switch blades so that you don't rely on the blade contact for good continuity?
Is this good practice to do this to every point on your layout regardless of whether the points are on the mainlines or sidings.
I am at the stage where I am starting to lay track and soldering droppers. Will be fitting Seep point motors eventually and all points are insulfrog.

Thanks

J.

[Brian]

Hi
Its always good practice to have the outer stock rails of points fitted with dropper wires. The next stage is increasing the length of dropper wires end and solder this between the stock rail and the adjacent closure rail on each side of the point. By doing this it removes reliance on the points switch blades making a good electrical connection to the stock rail when the point blades are closed onto the stock rail. However, it will mean that both directions from the point are live - you will lose the self-isolating feature of Insulated frog points. This is what the DCC user needs, but it is not ideal for the DC user! To overcome issues on a DC layout where bonding has been carried out, add two IRJs to the points frog Vee rails and then add new rail feeds after the point and if necessary insert On/Off isolating switching in these feed wires. Personally, on a DC layout using Insulated frog points I would only add dropper feeds to the outer two stock rails and not bond the closure rails to their stock rails!

[jed10]

You don't say if your layour is dc or dcc. As you have said that you have Insulfrog points I'm going to assume it is dc. In a dc layout, the main reason for using Insulfrog points is that it isolates the branch off in the direction selected. It does this because it relies upon the switch rail making contact with the appropriate stock rail. If you add link wires between the stock rail and the blades that defeats that functionality and you'd need to add an alternative method of isolation in which case you may just as well have used Electrofrog points in the first place which will give better performance. As to adding droppers to the stock rails, I'm not sure that on a dc layout this will be necessary.

If, on the other hand, you are wiring a dcc layout stop now. If you haven't yet laid your track go out and buy some Unifrog (ideally) or Electrofrog (will still need a bit of work if using soldnoid motors) points to use instead. These will give you significantly more reliable performance with live frog wiring. Sell off whatever you have bought in the way of Insulfrog points and just write off any loss to experience. You'll be much better off in the long run. If you are dcc and haven't yet bought the Seeps think about using Cobalt IP motors instead. These will also deal with your frog power switching and you won't need to modify the points other than to solder a dropper wire onto the group of wires just below the frog (and even that won't be necessary with Unifrog as it's already pre-fitted), and, of course, droppers to the toe end stock rails. No decoders required, no CDU required and no frog juicers required. All in all it will probably cost less overall even though the cost of the motors is more.

[FattishBoy]

Goodness! Think I have opened a real can of worms here, thankfully my layout is DC as I have lots of old locomotives, also I haven't as yet done to much work so really glad I asked the question before I had got it all down. I am not planning on anything really extensive as long as I can run my old locos and switch a few points al be happy. I tested a couple of locos before pining any track down a Hornby 9f and a small 040 tank engine and didn't have any issues running over points and diamonds.
Thanks for the advice.

J.