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I recently bought a Lionel plug and play icing station.

I tried wiring it several ways as described in the user guide.

When using the pigtail connector, I connected red to center and black to outside, white is unused. When applying transformer power, it shorts out.

Connecting directly to transformer yields the same result. 

I then bought a plug and play accessory track section. Made sure that the outer breaks are opposite the plug and play "lock on". Doing this, the icing station operates when applying track power. The problem is that it runs perpetually, completely unaffected by the on/off switch. Sliding from on/off does nothing. Depressing the switch seems to have the same effect has hitting the "direction" button on the transformer (CW-80).

Any thoughts are appreciated. Is the icing station mis-wired? Is the on/off switch defective in some way? Have I overlooked some obvious wiring issue?

Thank you.

 

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I agree with Sandjam. The nice thing about the PnP track section is that no electrical knowledge is needed beyond getting the item plugged in. If it doesn't work in that configuration then there is something wrong. I bought the PnP control tower and it works correctly. However, I did have to make some adjustments to the switch. I had to disassemble it and adjust (bend) the contacts to get things to work properly. The switch is a clever design but the contacts inside have some tolerance issues.

Steve

 

Last edited by RideTheRails

Thank you both for your replies. I wound up going back to the retailer where they have a power supply set up for testing. The tech. was able to reproduce my shorting issue when connecting the switch. He opened up another icing station and we tried a different switch, and everything worked as expected. 

In this case it was a defective switch. I did open it up to look at it before going back to the store, just so I could get a peek at the design. I'm going to open up the new one and take a look, just so I can see what's different.

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