Saturday Repairs

Work day started about 9AM at the track. Rich and I arrived and we started looking into the power supply issue with the roundhouse turnouts. He reported that last Sunday he found the supply had shut down and he had attached a battery to power the area. After a short time he found that the battery had been drained and was very hot. This points to a short circuit so now our problem was finding it. Usually this is not difficult as when wires short they usually melt or burn the insulation in the vicinity of the short. Jack arrived and helped us check out the wires on the surface of the ground. We went over the wire several times and finally I found a spot that had a kink and had partially melted and that was the site of the short. Jack spliced a new piece of wire in at that point and Rich got the power supply installed and working again.

The roundhouse button still did not throw the turnout so I started looking into that matter. The pushbutton switch looked to be in good condition and seemed to be working OK so it meant that the problem was in the wiring between the button and the turnout controller box. Most of this wire was buried when Tommy installed the button. We checked at the turnout controller end of the wire and found that the pulse was not coming out of the cable. We could apply a pulse at the input terminals of the turnout controller and cycle the switch machine so the controller was working properly - it had to be in the wire. We visually inspected the wire and the only splice that was visible had no damage and when the wires were bared they changed the switch machine when connected. This meant the problem was between the splice and the button. So we dug up the wire and it was intact from the splice on top of the ground to the point it crossed under the rails to the button post. We debated chopping off the wire and putting a new one on to the post but we still wanted to find the actual site of the break. It turned out that under the rails there was another splice buried underground that had opened up. We then cutoff the wire and added a section of new cable to run from the button to the outside of the tracks and spliced it on. Now the button functions reliably and that should fix it for quite some time.

We got out the inch F7s and some riding cars to check out the signals on the inch track. There was a lot of debris from the storms the other day so we had to stop quite a few times to remove pine cones and branches from the track. Even so we derailed six or seven times on the trip. The storms had moved some of the ballast rock and caused the wheels to climb up and over the rails here and there. We found a bad turnout as well up by Summit. We reported the bad turnout to Dan Akins so they can get it repaired before next weekend.

Richard started work on the turnout controller just before the long bridge by the station on the inch line. It does not signal the track selected correctly. It turns out that the microswitch used to detect the position of the turnout via a cam was broken. The lever that touches the motor cam broke off the switch body and was lying on the bottom of the case. There is no easy fix for this and the backup motor assembly had a switch with the same problem. Rich will talk to Tommy and see if he can supply either the assembly or another switch for the broken ones.