Posted on by Kumar Desai

DC Wiring Part 2 – Powering the track continued

Well I finally finished the wiring to power all the track. The two separate sections (the branch line and the traction freight line) are controlled from their own SPST switches. The crossovers required a little thought and in the end I came up with a couple of schemes to wire them up. I created a third bus not connected to either of the other two sections. The crossovers will always be on and are directly connected to the throttle. In order to control the frog poles I connected them to a DPDT switch and simply flip the switch to power the correct frogs for either direction.

This diagram demonstrates the general idea of how the crossovers are powered. I used just one DPDT switch to power all three crossovers.

This is the wiring to power the track. Because I decided to use buses to send power to the track each track has to have wires dropped down from the rails. It gets messy very quickly but works like a dream. Each wire can be disconnected from the bus in order to isolate problems. I was able to find problems very quickly just by isolating the power in sections.
I still have to add the wiring for the turnout motors so I may have to reorganize the layout on the staging platform.
The locomotive runs perfectly through the crossover.

Next on my list: turnout motors. I’m going to take a week off and start on that little project next weekend.