As I have mentioned in a previous post, I am very new to S gauge. I was pondering buying Fastrack for running S under the tree, and someone had mentioned the rubber roadbed that AF made. Well today I was at a train show and a fellow was selling some for $3 a section. I ended up with enough for a circle of track and 18 straights (some of the straights weren't the nicest...) So I spent about a 1/2 hour snapping track into the roadbed. Then I assembled a big oval on the floor, grabbed a transformer (A CW-80) and went to hook it up...
And that's when I realized I don't have a lockon for S gauge track. But then I remembered I did because I bought this dual gauge Lionel Lockon a few years ago. But where was it? After searching through far too many boxes I found it and installed it on the track, and with the turn of the throttle the train started to run. That is until the tender truck hit the piece of track with the lockon on it. After another lap of the train running fairly well only to stop on the lockon I decided to see why.
It turns out that the tab that snaps onto the far rail (from the terminals) sticks up high enough to hit the truck sideframe, which shorted out the circuit. To try to fix this I tried wrapping the tab in electrical tape, which got rid of the shorting problem, but now the cars snagged on the tape and derailed. Painting the tab with something non conductive may have worked. My next attempt was to bend the tab away from the rail a bit, but as you might guess, it made a loose connection. Three's a charm; I bent the upper part of the tab below the lower portion . so none of the tab extends above the railhead. I also bent it back inward a bit to get a tighter connection. This worked fine.
I wonder if I have been the only one to have this problem with this thing? It's such a simple device, yet it gave me a lot of trouble. I'll be buying AF lockons from here on out, should I end up needing any more.
Hopefully this will help out the next new guy trying to get an old set running again.
J White
