Alan Mancus posted:I would not be concerned with your wiring you show going under the track the black and white wire in yout picture is telfon coated and has a very good resisteance to NOT being pinched if you use the wire shown that's not your problem. I would suspect as someone said earlier in the forum you might have had an issue with the common wire inside your transformer coming loose or off and one side is trying to feed both sides which can causing strange voltage transients. open up the zw and test with a VOM not powered up and check continuity between both common ground terminals you SHOULD not see any resistance . should show dead short which would mean there is not problem but I suspect you will get a resistance which is most likely causing your issue. have you also checked your carbon rollers on the windings they do wear out and are not hard to change! the other thing might be your circuit breaker could be going bad with resistance causing a low voltage when under a load!! trains running on track!
good luck and let us know what you find out!
Thanks for this, Alan. The wire running to the track is new and good, but the piece I used for the accessories is old and I think the insulation is bad. It melted just enough to make contact with the tie it was led under, possibly because I had incorrectly put the hot lead to the outer rail and the common to the center. I have since changed the leads (hot to center, common to outer) and run new wire from the ZW to the accessories bus. Problem solved.
However, the ZW is old and just came out of a 30 year slumber in my attic, so definitely needs a full servicing. I'm going to open it up again and look at the posts and check the common wire and at some point replace the rollers and do the other needed work. In the meanwhile, I have decided to use my 1033 for the accessories (just light towers, lighted buildings and streetlamps for now) and wondering if it will also be beefy enough to provide constant voltage for my 11 022 switches. Any thoughts on that?
Thanks again,
Kevin
