I bought an under development n scale layout with 12 remote and 42 manual turnouts. One of these is curved, and part of a wye. As installed, it has no wires protruding underneath the layout. Can anyone identify the manufacturer of this turnout and tell me whether or not it might be remotely controlled?
Do you know anything about the age of the curved turnout since there were a number of manufacturers of them through the years. Off hand some of the older ones were Minitrix and Peco with about 4 listed for Minitrix and Atlas also has them.
I bought an under development n scale layout with 12 remote and 42 manual turnouts. One of these is curved, and part of a wye. As installed, it has no wires protruding underneath the layout. Can anyone identify the manufacturer of this turnout and tell me whether or not it might be remotely controlled?
Looks like Atlas to me... Wait. Hmmm... Trix? Although those terminals. Roco? Anyway, I bet the middle terminal is common, and the outside terminals control direction. Remote turnout, set up like an Atlas.
Well is a stumper to me but if you turn it over and closely check the ties on the bottom somewhere the manufacture should be stamped in the plastic. I checked some of my old stuff and a little on the web and came up with nothing yet.
I agree, turn it over. Atlas molds their logo onto the back of a tie. Definitely not a Peco. I've no experience with the others. To test the machine, use a 9V battery. Assume the center connector is common and clip one pole of the battery to it. Then touch the other battery pole to each of the other connectors and see what happens. Hopefully the points will flip back and forth. Other than that, I can't help you without having it in my hands.
Looks like it is ballasted in. No need to rip it out of there. Just check it like Hytec indicated. Its a simple wire job to put a remote switch in for it if it works ok. . ** just dont apply power to the terminals for too long or you WILL burn out that black solenoid
Thanks all. There is no contenuity across any of the screw combinations, so my guess is that there is no coil installed. Since removing the screws doesn't allow anything to be lifted off, a coil would apparently have to be installed from the under side. Without having said coil in hand, I am not going to dig it up unless by some fortune we can identify it. If someone can identify it, I'll go that route later. Thanks again for all of your responses. Don
Well, it's not an old Trix. I've had a bunch of those. If I was guessing, I'd say it's at least a variation of a Fleischmann: https://www.eurorailhobbies.com/product.asp?mn=5&ca=55&sc=N&stock=FL-22275 There were only a couple of manufacturers that made such tight curved switches, I only know of those two. Trix made R1/R2 with the inner radius like 7 1/2 and outer 9 3/4, and R3/R4 where it was like 11 and 13. I'd looked into the Fleischmann before and found these as well. I think they had similar specs. Other than a 3-way turnout its hard to find a piece of track that will make you more crazy, between the guardrail clearance, piling up on the frog, points loosing electrical contact, and keeping those pickup strips in the frog clean. You can rework them to make them more reliable, but you still have to keep them absurdly clean.
It looks like an Atlas switch machine, and the ties and point rails look like old Atlas code 80 track. I do not have much experience with these, because I have only removed the solenoids from some on a layout to replace them with under-layout servos. There were some that had screws that allowed the solenoid to be lifted away, and others, which yours appears to be, that I could not remove without destroying them. Anyway, if yours does not work with the 9v battery, it probably means that whoever had it before you got it somehow burned out the solenoids. The only repair for that is to replace the solenoids with new ones or with another mechanism like a servo or Tortoise stall-motor. If you can't get the old solenoid off in a manner that leaves a place to screw-on a replacement solenoid, then you are better off going to another mechanism. But, the track part of the turnout might be hard to replace, because the various curved turnouts from different manufacturers have different radii and lengths, so you can't just drop any one in place of any other. So, unless you have the flexibility to change your track arrangement substantially on that layout, it would probably be best to find a way to throw the points on the turnout you already have. (Typically, curved turnouts are used to save space, and are thus in tight places where a change of geometry causes problems with the rest of the trackage.)
If you want to replace it with a similar switch, steal some photos off the Internet of both the Fleischmann and Trix ones, because I'm pretty sure it's a standard European track radius and they are still available at a few places and on Ebay if you watch. Stick the images in a Word document, and start resizing and printing them to 'full size' by checking the gauge. Then you can literally compare the pictures with what you've got for a replacement. And you only have to find one as you can flip images horizontally. On my Trix ones, I just put under-the-table Rix machines on one, and Caboose Hobbies ground throws on another two. Not that big a deal, actually. I developed a real hatred of tiny, burnout-prone solenoids many decades ago and learned to do under-the-table installs of both solenoids and Tortoise drives, and lots of Caboose Hobbies throws on little-used switches. Photos if you want. But I would spend the time to put an under-the-table machine in there before I'd try to replace what's on there now if you're OK with the switch itself.
I bought a Trix turnout on eBay and hopefully if my Atlas 344 tcu works as advertised, that will keep the solonoid safe from burnout. What under layout solonoid motor works best if I have to go that route?
I started out with the usual tiny solenoids in N (1972) and as they burned out the only thing available was the big Lambert HO ones as a fix. They also had contacts that could be wired into signals - either panel signals or track ones. They had a rather long throw, and you could easily make a linkage out of K&S 1/16 tubing to go through the roadbed/table with spring wire steel cranks going through. The flexy spring wire combined with a big throw distance made it possible to locate one under the table in about any orientation. https://thumbs.worthpoint.com/zoom/...lenoid_1_9bdb28d12a3165a89ebf24e41e0ad8e6.jpg 95% of the machines I still have today are those old Lamberts, they are almost indestructible. When I went to a full capacitor discharge system (DC) I had to put diodes on them for not only control, but also back EMF blast, if you ever get into that problem just ask. But they also work just fine on AC like a regular solenoid. One thing, they have POWER and they are LOUD. When I throw the one button on my yard ladder than throws six at once, it's pretty distracting. But the switch MOVES, THROWS and LOCKS IN. Now, the Lamberts died out years ago, but the Rix machines are a dead-on copy of the exact same design. https://rixproducts.com/product/rix-twin-coil-switch-machine/ Sometimes you'll see big batches of these come up used when a layout is sold or torn down. If the contacts are there that's a good deal, as they are REALLY tough. My other favorite is a classic Tortoise machine, but they are a lot bigger. I mount them horizontally rather than vertically on the same kind of home-brew crank I use for the Lambert/Rix. Same thing, I've picked up a batch of them used. They are also kind of noisy, but the advantage is that you can control them on DC with a reversing DPDT switch and leave them 'on' without burning out. So the DPDT is also a position indicator on the panel rather than relying on contacts and lights to do the same thing. They are slow motion instead of BANG, but for most applications that's rather irrelevant.
Thanks randgust. The Rix ltwin coil looks like a great option because it can be mounted above table so as not to require replacing a switch with a fried motor.
You can mount it above the table but it's pretty huge. Home-brew linkages with brass tubing and steel wire are pretty easy to put them under the table. Only tricky part is learning how to drive tiny wood screws upside down into a precise location. Mark and drill first, then put a little bit of tape, rubber tape, or even rubber cement on the end of the screwdriver to hold the screw on the screwdriver end as you drive it in place upside down. There's a brass throw rod wire that comes with these, I use it to extend the throw rod on the machine and bend it into a tight "V" shape. By bending around that rod and opening and closing the "V" you can make final adjustments in the throw distance very easily post-mounting. It only gets complicated when you decide to glam-on lots of extra relays and contacts to indicate switch position on the control panels, as well as power signal positions on the layout for interlockings. The Lamberts had an optional and additional add-on set of finger contacts driven by a screw-in pin off the solenoid that could be bent up for normally-open, normally closed, you name it. Rather rare though.
