First off I’d like to say I’m a long time viewer of this forum. The knowledge on this forum has helped me out tremendously because it’s been a long time since I ran trains as a kid and boy did the hobby come a long way super excited to be back. Switched over from conventional to TMCC/Legacy and soon to be MTH once the basement is complete. But again, thank you for the knowledge on this forum.
So I decideed to take down my two looping main lines to allow for a single mainline that will encompass the whole basement. When the loops were set up I had the 072 switches (new style I’m assuming 5165&5166) doing the jobs of switching between loops. There are six switches in total. I bought the tubular track from menards. Ok but not great. The switches worked fantastically and of course I had each loop on a seperate electrical feed from the old school ZL transformer with two control knobs. Ran this system for about 8-10 months. Got bored with it and decided to do a single mainline around my whole basement to get a idea of what I want it to look like when I start to finish my basement. I want my basement to be an entertainment area that has TV, bar, couches and a train layout with a yard on one side of the basement and a loop the encircles the rest of the basement. Well enough of the backstory. I put the new layout together and it ran for a week with no hitches. Then this morning when I got home from work I ran the trains on the outer loop for about 10-15 mins before crossing over to turn my trains around. I’m running four legacy SD-90’s with about 10-15 freight cars of different sorts. They hit the switch and then after the first locomotive hit the next piece of track my layout shorted out. I have no idea what happened. First I though a section of track came loose and there was a derailment (frequent issue with the menards tubular track, again serviceable but only if you screw it down to wood which I will do if I can solve this issue and keep tubular), but there was no track separation anywhere. Next I took sections of the track apart to troubleshoot the short and foud no shorts in the tubular track when the 072 switches were all disconnected from the track. 2 of the 6 switches show continuity on the rails that are the two anti-derailment rails but the other four don’t. Did I short these? I read online that these newer switches are terrible compare md to the ones of the 1970’s and before. I want tubular but I’m leaning more and more toward Atlas. Any suggestions?
PS the first photo with the passenger car on the crossover is the piece of track where the short occurred. Second photo kind of helps give an idea as to how it looks from the other side.
