Hello all, Fairly new to the hobby and totally green in Z Scale. I inherited a pretty nice collection of Marklin Mini Club collection so decided to try my hand at a layout. I do not yet have a dedicated location to set something up so opted for a pretty ambitious portable box setup so I can fold and store. I have very limited electrical knowledge so after doing a lot of research decided to go for DCC and eventually try my hand at installing decoders. I am also using all new Atlas code 55 flex track and turnouts. I have enjoyed the trial and error aspect of figuring out z scale and now with a fair amount of accomplishment under my belt I am officially addicted. Now to my main point...I have surprised even myself by getting decoders installed in several of the steam locomotives and reviving them from their slumber. I already have most of the track laid and glued after testing with a few of the diesels I have and everything seemed to run smooth, but the steam locos stall through the dead frogs. I am looking for advice on powering the frogs and switches either through the DCC controller or an isolated power supply and would everything to mounted beneath the track base. I left plenty of room beneath the track base to add this later on but am eager to get these steam,locos running smoothly. I have been looking at the Tam Valley system of servos and decoders but am reaching out for any and all reccomendations and advice. For DCC I am using thr NCE starter powercab. I have a few photos from before I laid any track for reference to what I am working with. Thanks to everyone on this forum for all the knowledge I have already gained to get me to this point!
Welcome to the board. You can run power to the frog by soldering a wire from the frog contact: However, this power connection needs to be switched depending on the orientation of the turnout: left rail for normal, right rail for divergent. There are switch machines that will both move the points and switch the power. The one I'm familiar with is the Walther's switch machine which will work with both DC and DCC. Hope this helps, Mark
Consider Tam Valley Frog Juicers. Automatic frog switching with DCC. They are on my DCC N scale layout as built by another and they have worked flawlessly.
Hmm the frog juicer looks perfect. How does the juicer (and I'm assuming switch machines) switch back and forth? Is there just one wire soldered to the frog contact in markm's diagram and the juicer switches the polarity or are there 2 wires soldered and the juicer switches between the wires?
Just the one wire from the frog to Juicer. The Juicer is connected to the 2 wires of DCC so therefore generates the proper 'polarity' to the frog single wire. If you use a motor option, like a Servo from Tam Valley, the Hex Juicer is a better solution than the add-on relay board. If you use one of the MP1 or MP5 turnout controllers from http://www.modelrailroadcontrolsystems.com/, then you need to connect each of these motors to the 2 wire DCC bus and the 'common' goes to the frog. This wiring becomes a bit tricky, figuring out which polarity (when look underneath and left or right and. but just a simple one time 2-wire swap and your good.
you can manually move points o turnout and as engine touches frog it is connected automatically to correct power on a DCC layout for conventional DC layout use a tortoise switch machine and aux contacts will power frog based on position of turnout controlled by a toggle switch spdt.
