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The Randall Museum in San Francisco hosts a large HO-scale model model railroad. Created by the Golden Gate Model Railroad Club starting in 1961, the layout was donated to the Museum in 2015. Since then I have started automatizing trains running on the layout. I am also the model railroad maintainer. This blog describes various updates on the Randall project and I maintain a separate blog for all my electronics not directly related to Randall.

2024-02-25 - Trolley Automation and Turnout

Category Randall

The trolley automation regularly stops on this turnout:

This is definitely one of these Atlas turnouts where the frog is isolated. One way to handle these is to power the frog by placing a little screw and then soldering to it -- the metal of the frog is such that solder won’t stick to it easily as far as I know. There’s a little hole next to the frog that makes contact with the frog. I didn’t have a screw that would fit that, but I had some electrical wire of the adequate size. Also right now, we’re not going to run through the thrown leg of that turnout, so…

I simply stuck a little wire in there and soldered it to the inside of the outer rail. It has the desired polarity for the turnout in the closed position. It’s also very easily reversible. To complete the experience, I taped a little piece of gray tape to tone down the flashy green wire I used:

I call that a kludge. Orion called that “ghetto”. Same difference.

I do plan to revisit that later. I need to find the proper kind of screw or nail to fit in there. We have some of these exact same turnouts in the back so I’m going to experiment with these off-layout then I’ll be able to revisit this. Under the layout, the switch motor is one of the twin coils used everywhere on the old layout that is already almost wired for frog power routing. Green/blue is the “input” inner/outer rail power, and yellow is the “output” going to the frog.


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