Block wiring

Don,

Did I miss something in Barry's book?

You may have. Turn off Clickity-Clack. At 30 SMPH and faster, Clickity-Clack turns off engine sounds.

Menu/Sounds/Clickity-Clack and press the OFF soft key.

Barry, I set the Clickity-Clack to "off" . I then ran the engine on the same block again and  at a certain point the engine sounds went off. At another point further down the track the sounds came back on. I decided to check the track signal as the engine went around again. The track signal on that section of the block was very low so I'll have to look into that issue. 

That being said, is it necessary to isolate the common(black) wires/rails between blocks?

Thanks, Don

I have a 625 Square Foot layout and did NOT isolate any of the blacks between blocks. I actually even jumpered them all together at the TIU's. I have 2 and they also have a common ground to each other.

Curtish, Thank you for confirming what I thought. Don

Your four channels may need blocks within, depending on the length of track for each channel. Barry recommends a wire to every 10 to 12 track joints, isolated from each other.

John H, Each one of my channels has multiple isolated center rail sections. I guess you'd call those blocks? I do have a power wire every 8-10 joints and every one of my joints within a block has a jumper wire. I never felt the joiners would give me the good electrical connection I was looking for. It was a lot of soldering. Don

In answer to your original question, do not insulate outer rails between blocks, and tie all connections to black/outsiderails together at the TIU output.

RJR, Thank you. 

Don, you certainly did things the right way. It makes the signal/sound problem more mysterious.

John H,  I rewired my layout last fall. I went from using just the 2 fixed channels to changing the variable channels to "fixed" thus giving me 4 channels to work with.  I was so intent on balancing the power drops to my channels I forgot to put my homemade "filters" on every one of them. The filter is a capacitor & resister in series. Works like a "magic light bulb". I'll be checking every drop tomorrow. If a power drop doesn't have a filter I'll add one. I'm hoping that will fix it. I'll post again tomorrow or Tuesday. 

TRESTLEMAN, you may also have a TIU channel starting to go bad. Try swapping the bad block channel with another channel to rule out the TIU channel being the issue.

Dave Z, Will do