Model Railway Forum

Hi every one.
Have a large loft layout which I have converted to DCC over 2 years.
The main bus runs underneath all round in a loop.
If I have a problem on the layout the whole layout shows a fault.
Can I say fit 6 on off power switches spread around the layout
to break up the bus into 6 sections.
If I have a fault I can turn all power switches off and starting from
the controller to bus feed section and turn each switch on to each section
in turn until the fault shows up.
This should then tell me which section the fault is in to investigate.
Will this work ?
Mike

Indeed it should but you need to ensure that the track feeds to the rails match how you've divided up the bus. Rails above need to be isolated by IRJs, and droppers from the track should go to the correct part of the bus. In other words you need to ensure the rails don't bridge your switches. You should only need to isolate one rail in this way.

I think you may find more information about this here - think that's the right page. If not search Brian's site he does cover this sort of thing.

If you are going to wire all these switches back to a panel you might as well go the whole hog and use fast acting circuit breakers.

The process is to split the layout into districts. Separate both rails at each district boundary, likewise the bus. Connect each district bus through a circuit breaker and wire back to the controller. This way a short will only affect the district in which it occurs everything else should still run. One important thing to do is separate the point motor accessory bus with its own breaker or leave it connected directly to the controller this will mean if the short is the result of a wrongly set point you should still be able to operate the points to correct the short.

The circuit breakers need to react quicker than the short detection circuit in the controller, PSX circuit breakers are generally recommended.

Richard