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Rerailer Issues – What Am I Doing Wrong?
Ryan asks:
“My layout has 4 powered rerailers and I thought I would connect my first rerailer on one side to the control board and connect from the other side of that rerailer to the next rerailer and continue from there. I connected my main feed and all seemed ok until I joined up the next rerailer. My control started to flash quickly which I presume is a warning I have done something wrong. What? Thanks in advance.”
SUBMIT YOUR QUESTION
It seems like you have a short. Either you have crossed the wires on the last rerailer you connected up, or you have a reversing loop or something going on. Have you tried skipping that rerailer and connecting directly to the next one? That would at least tell you which part of the layout is problematic. Without a layout diagram it’s a bit hard to diagnose.
Most likely you reversed the polarity on the last connection. Or, the rerailer itself has a fault. Shouldn’t be too difficult to run down.
I have not dealt with “powered” rerailers but, I am an electrical engineer, What I am guessing is that the powered part refers to keeping the rails powered at all times. If this is true, it appears that you are flipping polarity in the tracks by daisy-chaining the rerailers. If you did want to run the wiring in parallel, I would exam each connection to see if one did not get connected the way you wanted. What you describe appears to be a direct hard short. Take your multimeter and measure the ohms across the rails (with the power off and preferably disconnected) depending on your connection, the meter should read well over 100 ohms. If you have a short, then the reading should be less than 10 ohms. You should have all of one side connected to one side of the rerailer and the other side should be together, never crossing together
If you can give a few details of your layout, it will help us to understand the problem.
Do you have DC or DCC ?
As Geoff says, please post a track diagram, as the issue is most likely a short caused by wrong polarity connection.
If you include the wiring circuit on the track diagram, the problem will probably be immediately clear.
What is with so many rerailers? And why are they powered.? I have one rerailer and it is a plastic ramp affair that I sit on the track and roll cars down so that they roll off the ramp and sit properly on the track. Educate me please
in this case, it refers to a piece of track with a built-in rerailer that is also a place to connect the power leads for the track. The rerailer itself is not powered. For example
https://shop.bachmanntrains.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=2465
Thanks Geoff. This proves that I am a Luddite – guilty as charged!
thanx to geoff david frank steve william i now understand