Hi all -
First time post here. Last year I pulled out my old Lionel trains for my 15 month year old son and was surprised by how interested in them he was. After xmas, and over the year, I picked up a few items, some additional used track, and a ZW transformer to build a more complex/interesting layout this xmas. I'll post pics of it later, but in putting it together, operating it, I ran into a problem with two 5122 switches I have in it.
Both have 'quasi failed'. Each time, I had a train derail on the opposite side of the switch from where the power is fed, and couldn't get to the transformer quickly enough to shut it down before a small plume of smoke came out of the middle of the switch track, right where the intersection of the two lines occurs.
After the 'smoke came out of it', there was no power across the switch and of course, the train would stop as soon as it crossed the switch. The obvious solution is, of course, to inject power (right now I'm using lock-ons) on both sides of the switch. And hindsight being 20/20, this would have also prevented the failure as it would have prevented a large amount of current from passing through the switch during the derail.
I opened up one (drilled out the rivets), and to my surprise, see no physical damage. I get 8.4 ohms across each switch coil. It still doesn't pass power across the switch, and to operate that loop, I need to have two lock-on's, one on each side of the switch.
I intend to modify these to use auxillary vs track power, but I would like to solve the above problem and get them back to 100% functionality before doing so. Other than the above, they seem to work well (although I should not I haven't tried hooking up the remote switches to test), including the non-derailing feature (which is critical to this layout). One does seem to buzz loudly when a train comes through and is switched through the non-mainline (in either direction)
I'm unsure why they aren't passing power. I have one that clearly does and these certainly did before. What should I look for? What am I missing?
Brent
