@Santa Bill K posted:I should have mentioned this in my post.
My layout is somewhat large and complex with the outside rail being common everywhere. I would have to rewire the entire layout to switch the polarity that way. I did disconnect some of the track and swamped the connections as you suggested and it worked, but I want to avoid rewiring the whole layout.
Any other way around this problem?
My take on this, let's fix what is messed up.
Did you follow the convention that U on a ZW goes to outside rail and ABCD are center rail or accessories?
If that is how your track to transformer is wired- then whoever refurbished the transformer may have somehow reversed the polarity of the disk diodes.
And why this matters- well the U posts are all common on the ZW, and typically, people use common wiring of the outside rails with accessories and that makes switching the wires at the transformer a bigger problem.
So, while simple swapping the wires for a test track to determine- is your ZW actually correct for troubleshooting- perfectly OK as a test.
That said, more permanent swapping wiring between the common U post and ABCD posts can be problematic in a complicated layout where common is used and expected on outside rail to "work around" a backwards whistle diode.
Again, one of 2 scenarios:
#1 your wiring from the transformer to track was wrong from day one
OR
#2 whoever did the refurb- somehow got the whistle diode wrong
