Simple wiring gone wrong

quote:

I ran ground to all outside rails and positive to all center rails.

It sounds like you got one of those connections backwards. Check and check again. There's nothing in a three rail track plan that would cause a short. What switch machines are you using? Did you wire for non-derailing?

When trouble shooting, break the track into sections, such as north end, south end separated. As you isolate areas it's easier to find the problem. You may have several faults.

A common problem is switching the ground and positive wires at the track connection point. Look for a strip of bare wire, screw, tack, paper clip, etc. in the track. Check for bare wire touching two binding posts on transformer.

With 4 sets of power strips that are daisy chained from the transformer, I was able to brake the layout down to 4 sections. 3 out of 4 have issues and we spent 2 hours verifying all ground terminated to ground rail and + to center rail. We did not add the derail option at this time on the Ross and Gargraves switches. We are 90% Gargraves switches.

Just my thoughts but I'd put all those ready tracks and it's loop on a separate switches(One per track) . There are 2 reasons for this. First passenger cars and cabooses/cabeese lights drain a lot of power and drain it unnecessarily when they're just sitting. The second reason is that the smoke units in these engines run weather you've got them shut down or not and you can fry the element if you let them run dry and there they sit drawing even more power.

I said this in an earlier post. Always try to use White, Green and Black as your grounds around your layouts You can call them commons if you prefer that term.

That way when problems like this occur you can easily see if you've got a wire reversed because if it's not any of the above colors you'll know that wire is hot.

Your only recorse now is to take the track apart in sections and start checking it with an ohm meter. MAKE SURE IT"S NOT STILL CONNECTED TO THE TRANSFORMER did I say that loud enough.Not because you may turn it on but because the windings in the transformer may give you a wrong reading.

Good Luck and keep pluggin at it you'll get it and we'll help all we can

David

Thanks for the information DPC, the smokers can be costly

Of course, you can turn off the smoke with the remote when you park them. I still agree with leaving them unpowered when they're parked, but you won't burn out the smoke units if they're not turned on.