AC&E Power Restored
Hi All, looks like I’ve finally nailed my power problem in the Rumford section of the RR.
On Monday I turned on the power for 24 hours and the whole RR stayed up , so I thought I could eliminate the turnouts (shinoharra’s) from the equation.
On Tuesday I spent about 5 hours rewiring all of my connections to the rails and separated the connections to the 3 breakers into 3 separate feeds thru a 6 position terminal strip
by now I think I have re-wired most all of these connections. I set two engines running, one in the Yard at Rumford and one in West Livermore and they ran OK for about 2 hrs before the damn thing went down again. By now there was about a 6 foot flame coming out my backside and I just sat down and looked at what I had just spent hours doing when I thought, Oh crap, I never, ever, changed out the power supply. I exchanged the power supply in Somerville with the Rumford power supply and 15 minutes later the whole Somerville section acted like my Rumford problem.
Voila, the answer was simple after all of the re-wiring and hours of aggravation.
I ran up to MAINE TRAINS, Gerry is most helpful and talented – (shameless plug) and got a new power supply and let it sit running for 6 Hours, stayed up fine, set two engines on two districts and let them run for 3 hours and all stayed up. Finally the solution to this huge pain in the you know where was simple after all.
I had been saying right along that it acted like something thermal and everyone kept telling me solid state electronics are not thermal, they are right but the damn power supply is just electrics not electronics. My thoughts were at least vindicated.
To all who have assisted me in chasing this, THANK YOU for all of your time, I never suspected this was the root of the problem (the over heating of the power supply and it just shutting down.) was never apparent to me as the point of concern.
I think we can expect the AC&E to run at it’s best after all of the re-wiring, the RR is now pretty much bullet-proof and should provide some good running in the future.
Ace