Wiring MTH Operating Boxcar with 2 Shoes

@James Ford this may be helpful to you.  It shows the standardized O gauge 3 rail power and ground locations for the Lionel UCS control rails.  Ignoring the uncoupling coil wiring, the rest should show what you need.

I saw a youtube vid from Erics Trains that does a great job explaining how to hook up these control rails.

(Start at the 18:00 minute mark)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y31p1AiPaWA

I believe you want one control rail hot and the other one common.

The MTH cars just use the sliding shoes to trigger the mechanism;  actual power is from the pickup roller and outer rails, just like an engine.

@SteveH posted:

@James Ford this may be helpful to you.  It shows the standardized O gauge 3 rail power and ground locations for the Lionel UCS control rails.  Ignoring the uncoupling coil wiring, the rest should show what you need.

Thanks Steve but I'm just not able to decipher what is happening with the pile up switch at the bottom. It is not clear to me if the left control rail is getting power or common and the same for the right control rail. I need to find out what to send to each shoe to determine if my boxcar is bad or if it's just faulty wiring.  

@James Ford posted:

Thanks Steve but I'm just not able to decipher what is happening with the pile up switch at the bottom. It is not clear to me if the left control rail is getting power or common and the same for the right control rail. I need to find out what to send to each shoe to determine if my boxcar is bad or if it's just faulty wiring.  

Maybe this will help. You can connect a momentary DPST switch's input poles to track power and ground.   The 2 switched outputs connect to the the 2 control rails.

In the case of the Atlas Accessory control rails, one side gets Hot and the other Ground.  Since this is an AC circuit, which rail is which doesn't matter as long as one aux rail is hot and the other is common/ground.

I posted this diagram of the 40-1008 track section in previous OGR threads.   It doesn't contradict anything the guys above have been saying.

In your original wiring diagram that didn't work, you show only one "left" control rail and one "right" control rail.  Note how there are two "left" (green) and two "right" (brown) rails.  This allows the operating car to face either direction.

As Professor says, the control rails are used to momentarily apply power to trigger/start the action on the MTH operating cars.  Once the operating cycle starts, the car uses track power (center and outer rails).

I don't know if this applies to you, but if this is a one-off there have been interesting OGR threads about how to activate the operating car without using the 4th/5th control rails.  In other words, it takes different perspective of delving into how the car is wired vs. how the operating track section is wired.  For example, I recall one discussion where the non-MTH track system (I don't recall which brand) did not play well with the sliding shoes as they would get hung up or whatever.  So we came up with a way to eliminate the 4th/5th rails, remove the slider shoes, and instead use the uncoupling coil to trigger the operating car.

@SteveH posted:

Maybe this will help. You can connect a momentary DPST switch's input poles to track power and ground.   The 2 switched outputs connect to the the 2 control rails.

In the case of the Atlas Accessory control rails, one side gets Hot and the other Ground.  Since this is an AC circuit, which rail is which doesn't matter as long as one aux rail is hot and the other is common/ground.

Steve,

Can't thank you enough, this is exactly what I needed to finish up testing, turns out it was the car that was malfunctioning on me, after pulling it apart I saw some wires that had come off the board, after putting this back and wiring up the atlas rails with the shoes being hot and ground it worked! Really appreciate your help on this.

Sincerely,

James

Hey @stan2004 ......

Thanks for sharing! I'm going to add this to my personal Knowledge base. Always good to have these "nuggets" of information at my fingertips for future reference!