JD_Reith posted:.. One question though, how long of a section of insulated track do you think should be used? Wasn’t sure if it mattered or not.
I may be misunderstanding your question, but in my scheme there are two types of insulation. First, the center-rails of each siding must be isolated into blocks. So as shown above, the orange center-rail (A-siding) can be powered/unpowered. Likewise, the pink center-rail (B siding) can be powered/unpowered. The mainline red center-rail is always powered.
Additionally, you have the insulated-rail triggers. There is a lot of flexibility here. In general, the yellow section only needs to be shorter than the orange section. It can be just a few inches long or basically long enough so that when the trolley reaches it, the trolley wheel axles will "reliably" short the outer rails to generate the electrical trigger. As the trolley enters the siding from the mainline, as soon as it hits the insulated rail section (yellow or light blue), it will lose power and coast to a stop...probably in just a few inches but depends of course on initial trolley speed.
In my scheme, when a siding powers up, the trolley must continue to the right, hit the bumper, reverse, start going left and enter the mainline within some number of seconds (say, 10 seconds). This is where the time-delay comes into play. The time-delay disables the insulated-rail trigger giving the trolley time to startup, bump-n-reverse, and exit the siding. You cannot place the leading-edge (left-side) of insulated-rail trigger too close to the bumper or else when you power up a trolley it will not have enough acceleration zone to get up to a fast enough speed to reliably hit the bumper and reverse. This is probably only about a foot or so but again depends on how much fixed AC track voltage you use.
