Hello Everyone. The title of this post summarizes my problem but first a little background.
I'm in the process of resurrecting a 20 year old 22' x 18' C-Shaped layout. It's a mixture of a small amount of old Lionel O-31 tubular track and 022 remote switches (from when I was a kid) in hidden areas and Gargraves flex-track and manual switches in the viewable areas. My trains are mostly 50+ year old Lionel stuff that are still working (mostly), powered by ZW and KW transformers (also from when I was a kid). I first built this layout when my two sons were little and we all greatly enjoyed it from the time they were 2 and 5 years old respectively to when they went off to college. Then I had a furnace problem and since the layout encircles the HVAC I had to cut out a large section of track and benchwork where it remained on the basement floor for the past 10 years.
Well, I have grandchildren now...the perfect excuse to renovate! My overall goal is to substantially expand the layout with a 70' x 6' extension down to the other end of the basement, replace the existing tubular track with more Gargraves track (minimum 54" diameter curves in place of the 031) and also gradually get into some newer equipment with Railsounds/Protosound and Legacy and/or MTH DCC. I reconnected the section I cut out, rewired, cleaned all the track and lo and behold everything more or less works. But now to the problem at hand. Like I said before, it's been 10 years since I last ran the trains. I now recall that I had nothing but aggravation with the trains running through some (but not all) of the Gargraves switches (there are about 15). The trains run flawlessly through the Lionel 022s but on some of the GG, I find that often (but not always) the front half of a car will go straight through the switch and the back half will divert. It doesn't matter which way the switch is thrown. This happens most often with my GG-1 Congressional Set, especially the 2500 passenger cars. But it happens with other cars and engines too. There appear to be two different generations of Gargraves switches. There is one style where the moving points are fabricated out of a single piece of sheet metal. Then there is another (newer, I think) style where the points are actual rails. The problem seems to be confined to the newer style of switches. So, would changing out the switches to Ross solve my problem or are there some other l things I need to check? All my switches are in flat sections and all the manual switches have Caboose Industries 208S ground-throws. I was hoping to add machines to the Gargraves switches but if there is a fundamental problem with GG, I don't want to throw good money after bad.
I am so glad I discovered this forum. If something like this had existed 20 years ago I probably wouldn't have made all the mistakes I did. I'll probably have more questions as I progress, but hopefully you can get me started and solve this riddle.
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