This may be a question for the Electrical Engineers out there and the topic is bridge rectifiers. I am not an E.E.. I'm an old skool N Scale DC modeler and all of my previous railroads have successfully employed a bridge rectifier in my reverse loop circuits. As the train traverses the reversing section, I manually throw the power pack's direction switch and it all works perfectly, although there's a very slight slowing of the train speed in the reverse section. This small voltage drop is typical for bridge rectifiers from what I gather. If I were to build my own bridge rectifier using four Schottky diodes, would that be an effective solution? I realize that I'm being needlessly fussy, as the slowdown is very minor, but I thought I'd ask out of curiosity. I enjoy tinkering with this sort of thing. Thank you!
I just looked that up and am learning about it. Thank you for the suggestion. The convenient aspect of my choices is that I can use screw terminals at my reversing section input and output, then easily experiment with different circuit options. Thanks again.
if you want to reduce the voltage loss in the bridged diode array, then yes, the substitution with schottky diodes will accomplish that ..
How would that work? Can the train only traverse the reversing loop in one direction? I guess that is my answer, if the power pack is hooked up to the loop via a bridge rectifier it would only supply power in one polarity direction no matter which way the power pack was set.
For variation, I wire in an additional DPDT direction switch for the reverse track section to allow entry via either end.
