Rob, thanks very much. Changing the wiring as you suggested eliminated the issue of the train being activated when I threw the switches! Cant believe I screwed that up. In any case, the only issue I am seeing now is that there is substantial sparking when the train travels over the switches. Any thoughts?
I still need to pull apart the non-working switch and test as you described above, although given how inexpensive these are, I am not going to waste too much time monkeying with it.
