Electrical help

I'm not sure who here is close by you?

I run 2 rail with DCS and could help with any questions. It sounds like the engines are stalling on your switches? What brand of switches? Are you engines upgrades or stock? PS2? Are the batteries charged up? How's the rest of the layout?

 Did the engines run good on DC as your claim eludes to "It is fully wired to run"?

 I wired my layout and then had to fine tune some stuff to get the best power spread throughout the layout without dropping voltage. When the power is full the signal usually is fine. I ended up creating blocks with switches usually at the ends. I added power wires jumping the switches to help carry the load without burning up any switch points.

As E Joe stated"I added power wires jumping the switches to help carry the load without burning up any switch points."

This helps immensely There are threads on this topic everywhere,2 and 3 rail.

Are each of your blocks isolated and fed power with a pair of twisted wires?

Do you have power fed to each end of all 3 legs of each turnout?

If you have two turnouts next to each other do you feed power between them?

Do you have selective polarity fed to the frog?

Are you relying on only having rail joiners supply linear track power?

You could get away with some of the above but if you are having problems these thoughts will give you a place to start.

The first thing to determine is if the root cause of the problem is track wiring or locomotive pickup.  Does the drop off occur repeatedly in the same place.  If so use a meter across the rails in that area to determine if you have a  "dead" rail.  This can be the case if one is counting on rail joiners to conduct the electricity between rail sections.  In that case the fix is  to solder a feeder to the dead rail.

  Steam locomotives can be more prone to pickup issues as the wheelbase for pickup is typically shorter than with all wheel pickup found on better diesels.  

I have recently had electrical pickup issues running a new 2 rail MTH N&W J.  Several  friends have had pickup issues with their 2 rail MTH steam locomotives.  In my case the problem was intermittent pickup through the drivers on the left side of the engine (MTH uses engine pickup on the left rail vice the right on my other 2 rail steam locomotives..  My fix will be replacement phosphor bronze wipers running on the back side of all 4 left side drivers.

Ed Rappe

I appreciate the thoughtful replies of everyone. In my case, I have fully wired the rails and turnouts and they get plenty of power, so I feel the problem is with the steam engines, not the tracks. Keystone Ed mentioned his problem with pickups on MTH steam engines, so this is the likely culprit. I would like to replace the wipers on my engines, and wonder how to best do this. Where could I get replacements?