Power distribution

Oh, and I'm using Fastrack if that matters.

How far apart are your power connections. You may just need more, or a heavier gauge wire.

Our club layout is 80ft long and trains going around the layout fine on a single transformer.

You need to run power feeds every 6-8 ft with #14 zip cord.Pay attention to polarity.Keep the white tracer or the silver wire on the center rail non tracer or gold wire on the outer rail.Connect all the wires to an MTH terminal strip.Connect transformer power to the MTH terminal strip.Nick

Volphin,

Passenger cars in particular require a lot of current.  Recommendations:

• You should be running power feeds more frequently for that size of layout.  Every 6-8 feet or 4-5 track joints is a good idea.  Run feeder wire pairs to terminal strips as shown below.  IMHO the MTH terminal strip is horribly overpriced for what it does.  More than adequate terminal or barrier strips are available for $1-2 (see diagram below) from www.allelectronics.com, www.digikey.com, Radio Shack, and many, many other sources.
• Look at the concept of power districts.  That's where you electrically divide your layout so that the electrical load of one or more trains is divided among power sources.  Essentially, that's the idea you had to use with multiple Z-4000 throttles.  My layout is running 8 power districts with 2 Lionel 180 watt powerhouse transformers.  Four power districts (pairs of terminal strips) are shown on the left side of the diagram.

Hope this helps.

George

For what it is worth.  On my layout work I use 14 ga feeders for a small RR (12' x 12') 12 ga for up to 40' runs and all my large RR get 10 ga. feeders or buss.

Yes, I know that so and so runs everything well on his full basement pike with 16 ga wire.

Performance can suffer with undersize wire but not with oversize wire.  NAO

This chart can be helpful in selecting wire size.  Layouts just need the first one or two columns.  There are mitigating variables, but you will not experience poor performance with these sizes.

Forgot.  All track power is provided using 14 gauge stranded wire.

George

George - ok you have 14 gauge wire for power feeds but how big is your layout and how far apart are you feeder wires?

Paul