RSS Fetcher Posted August 18, 2018 Share Posted August 18, 2018 If you have been following this series you'll know my DCC based loft layout uses Peco 75 Electrofrog points, DCC Concepts Cobalt point motors and Hornby RailMaster for control. Elelctrofrog double slips are interesting and about £65 to setup (point plus two motors), and in this post I wanted to show you what I did do get one of these working as I wanted with the infrastructure I have The simple thing to remember when wiring these is that the point motor opposite the frog is the one that controls it, NOT the one it is nearest to. I hope this diagram makes that clear, although of course for a change of route to not derail a train the other blades may need to move as well: So we can think of a double slip is two ordinary points collapsed onto one another and there are four combinations of how the two motors can set the route through the double slip, left-left, left-right, right-left and right-right. This will become clear later on in this post when RailMaster is configured to control the double slip. Let's look at the wiring. A Peco electrofrog double slip has four dropper wires attached, two for the frogs and one for each side of the centre of slip (you can just see one of these silver wires at the bottom of the picture above). To be honest I am not sure why it's recommended to insulate all the rails into and out of a double slip but if we do that then the dropper wires to the outside of the slip must be connected up for power through the slip. Here's the wiring underneath this double slip to automate it with DCC Cobalt DIP motors, including power to the outside rails: Note that point motor CV0083 is on the left and CV0082 is on the right. The configuration of a double slip in RailMaster is not explained that well, and is in my opinion inaccurate. What is correct is that there is no symbol for a double slip so two points have to be used and that fits in with the idea of a double slip as two collapsed points. What isn't really explained in RailMaster (although I am not great at manuals!) is the need to swap the control buttons for the two point motors, as you can see : Point CV0082 is now on the left. However, this configuration then works exactly as per a double slip for the 4 possible routes through it, where the brighter red and green control buttons indicate how the motor is set and RailMaster shows the resulting route in pale blue superimposed on the track plan. If you think about it, this follows on from the first diagram in this post - the motor controls the route at the other end of the point, and it also matches the way the frogs are cross wired to prevent short. RailMaster implies that the control of the points needs to be linked in some way - when one point is thrown the other needs to move, but each one of the four ways of configuring the points is a legitimate route it's just like any point if you come toward it with the point set the wrong way bad things will happen. For now I want the motors to operate independently, although I can use the features in Rail Master to tie point setting together right across my layout. I hope all this makes sense, but there is still no substitute for testing by running a loco through each route, and as I mentioned in my last post you may well need to swap the red black wires going into the point motor to ensure the right polarity is passed to the frog. I also hope what I have written is correct, but if I have it wrong then please let me know and I'll fix it - I'd rather be correct and a bit embarrassed so other can learn from my fumblings in the loft Attached thumbnail(s) View the full article Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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