I use RealTrax only when setting up a quick one- or two-day floor pattern, on a rug, when grandkids visit. Two years ago I started having connectivity issues. I found sections that were dead. They came back to life if I pushed down on the rail near the end of the piece of track. Examining the curly connection pieces used to connect one piece to the next showed them to be good and making good contact.
I am thinking now that somehow the connection (on a single piece of the track) between the rail itself and the connection piece underneath is breaking apart. But I don't know how to prove that or more importantly, fix it.
I read these comments on another thread and am hoping that one of these 2, or any of you, know what the problem is and what the fix is.
PAULP wrote:
I started working with RealTrack in 2000 on a yearly public holiday display. It was up for a little over 4 weeks time each year.
But during the second year of use we started experiencing some dead sections in a few of the loops during that year. And we had to run some jumpers to these sections to get the trains running again. But as we started building for third year of use we started experiencing the problems right after laying the tracks down. And then we started inspecting the tracks with the problems and found that the problem was that the center rail was breaking free from the bottom contacts. We found about a half dozen sections that were bad and removed them from service. As we started construction in 2004 we inspected all of the sections before we laid out the loops and found about 20 bad sections of track.
And then Gandalf97 (Eris S.) wrote:
Every year was a problem with bad connections on track that was barely used. Every year I had more problems until I finally gave up on it
What Paulp wrote sounds exactly like what my problem is.
What is the fix??????? NOTE: I realize many that have PERMANENT layouts are OK, but those that continually tear down and rebuild are most likely the ones that can relate to my issue.
As always, thank you for the help
- walt
