In putting my new track plan together I decided to create a fresh wiring scheme. I now have two of three loops wired up to a point where they will be on a grade, I haven't made the incline yet and as such I'm not going to wire there yet. These loops don't have a complete circuit as the grade is used for a crossover which, without the rise from the grade, blocks completing the circuit. Either way, these loops have feeders part way around coming from a buss wire. I used Lionel's FasTrack feeder clip on wires just fyi. Both of these loops work fine, I have tested and run locomotives on them.
There is a third inner loop on my layout for which I have prepared but not wired a series of feeder power drops. I wired a set of wires from my ZW-L to the first feeder on this loop. Hot to hot and ground to ground, making sure the middle rail was hot and the outside rail was the ground. Nothing complicated. When I fire up the transformer however I get an overload. The red light turns on and the circuit breaker is triggered. I tried using a different FasTrack power clip, I tried using a different section of track as the connecting point, I tried hooking the wires up to different handles on the transformer. No matter what, the track shorts and there is a noticeable "electrical buzzing" sound.
However, what I can't figure out is why the middle loop works when I break the circuit. When I break the circuit the middle loop lights up and locomotives can run on it fine. I don't know what's wrong here, shortly before I undid the wiring from my last layout I salvaged some of it to power the inner loop and that worked fine. Now with the new wiring scheme, simple as it is with only one power drop installed, it doesn't work.
Attached are pictures of the layout for reference.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks for taking the time to read this.
