Hi everybody,
Thanks a lot for your replies. After I posted the topic yesterday, I set all the track on plastic wrap rolled out on the lawn, and that helped some. Also, by sheer dumb luck/coincidence/strange things happen/I don't know everything about TMCC, I switched the railsounds/signalsounds switch on my locomotive from railsounds to signalsounds, and that seemed to help it respond better. Any guesses as to why?
The locomotive worked pretty well for most of the day. We pushed all the track sections together to make sure that they were making good contact, and that seemed to help too. At the end of the day the locomotive started having trouble, but that may have been due to dew starting to condense on the tracks.
We cleaned the rail quite a bit, but we didn't clean the wheels on the locomotive. That's a good idea. I will do that (dew that, ha ha ha) and see if it helps.
We didn't try the extension cords strung out as ground wires, but I will probably try that later today.
I have a few questions:
From what I've read, I get the impression that the outer rails of the track and the U post are not connected to earth ground. This implies that the transformer is behaving as an isolation transformer. Is this right?
From what I understand, the TMCC signal is sent out through the ground pin in the power cord that goes to the Command Base, and gets propagated through wiring in your house. The antenna in the locomotive picks up this signal, and the current flow that is induced by this signal is returned through the wheels and outer rails to the U post and screw terminal on the Command Base. Is that right?
I'm slightly confused. Some people have advocated stringing out a wire connected to earth ground along the tracks. Other people say that if you connect a wire to the Command Base screw terminal and string out the wire along the tracks, the locomotive will pick that up. I believe these are two different electrical scenarios. Would they both work? Would they both work at the same time? Maybe it's even better at the same time! I need to get some Tylenol for my head after thinking about this....
Is there a good way to electrically join together two sections of tubular rail in a conductive, permanent way? Some sort of glue or clips or purpose-made gizmo perhaps? I'm thinking that I could permanently join together a number of sections of tubular rail in order to help the TMCC signal and cut down on voltage drops. Maybe I should just string out a bus wire and put some lock-ons on the rails farther out.
