Model Railway Forum

Hi ,
Please take a look at the attached diagram which shows a portion of my 009 layout. I am particularly concerned about the rail breaks at the place marked "A" in red as I am getting some strange behaviour on the frog to the right of the arrow - basically it seems to remain dead despite the polarity switching on the point motor (PL-10 with PL-13 switch). The switch is operating correctly on the motor when tested disconnected.

All of the tracks apart from the lowest are "dead ends" i.e. sidings so no feeds coming in from the ends.

Please let me know if the track connections and rail breaks I have annotated are correct or have I missed something?

Thanks

David

Is this DCC or DC for a start.
If DC I would have switched supply to every siding if several locos are in use in the the sidings. But that may be over the top. Other than that, it looks OK to me. You can isolate as many as you want to. Guess it depends on the size of the yard.

Drawing looks fine assuming all red and black triangle feeds are actually on rails as shown.

Look for a possible broken or poor connection of the frog wire on point T3? Also double check the PL13 is actually making 100% contact when the point is set straight. PL13 are known to be problematic!
Check with a multimeter on Volts range and with rail volts ON (DC range for Analogue and AC range for DCC) . Start on the rails before the point and leave the upper (Red feed) rail meter lead in place and move the lower rail (Black triangle feed) meter lead along that rail and through the point and out to the frog and Vee rail. You should maintain a reading throughout up to the IRJs. If it is lost on the Vee rails but is present everywhere before that, then either the frog switch or the frog wire is defective. If you haven't removed the two little link wires bridging the two Closure rail gaps (if fitted on OO9 points?) check the point blade is a good clean fit onto the stock rail when closed together. Possible High Resistance in the point blades pivot can lead to problems

Thanks guys, it is DC and in fact the length of those sidings is pretty much it so they are quite short.

I'll be checking again this evening with the multi-meter as suggested. I'm not sure about the links between blades and adjacent stock rails as I didn't lay this track, we inherited it. I'm not even sure if Peco did put those links in - again I'll check this evening

More news later

David

Hi
Not the links that are added by the user and are soldered in place, which link outer stock rail to adjacent Closure rail on each side.
But I mean Peco factory fit a gap in each closure rail (I'm unsure if this is done with OO9 points?) and as supplied there is a fine link wire bridging the gap in each rail. If one (or both) of these is broken away it can with the PL13 switch being not 100% lead to no power after the gap through the frog and out to the IRJs on the Vee rail.
If the point isn't new it may be the frog wire is broken somewhere?

Hi,
Well, all the meter readings are correct showing the switch activating the frog properly and there is continuity through the frog to the relevant stock rail and branch rail. I wasn't able to complete all my tests last night so I'll be trying again next week.

Brian, I will have to check for that specific issue next week as well but these points are quite old so even comparison with a new one won't tell me much.

More news later

David

SOLVED!

The Peco 009 points do not have link wires from frog to switch rails, the switch rails are mounted onto a small metal plate shared by the V crossing rails so that wasn't an issue. I checked everything again and all my tests with the baseboard disconnected and up-ended were fine. I put it back together and ran a loco over it and guess what - it stopped on the point labelled T1. I redid the continuity test on all rails across all joints and finally found a tiny break in the rail almost exactly where the black triangle is before T1 - it was possible to break the continuity with light pressure on the rail and this is why locos stopped but the continuity test didn't find it. I soldered a short jumper wire and all is now functioning as it should

Reminded me of by programming days - but I never thought I'd be debugging a model railway.

Cheers and thanks for all the hints and help

David

Glad to read you have found the problem.

Even better to see that you have also solved it!