Hi Jock,

I noticed your post and I thought I'd reply.

There are several ways of handling frogs and it depends on the type of track.

With the track I'm using the frog is completely isolated, the point blades and tracks leading from frog to the diverging rails are bonded to the side rails. In this case you can ignore the frog if the locos are long enough and have good contact.

However some track has completely plastic frogs, I'd avoid this... In this case some of the tracks are bonded, other parts may rely on contact to the outer rails. It depends...

The third type relies on contact to power the frog, the diverging rails and point blades.

So for the first case: just leave it initially but solder a wire to the bottom of the frog, so you can always add frog polarity switching later.

Type 2: Avoid!

Type 3: As for 1, but you might get into trouble if you're using very old rolling stock with massive play on the wheels, in that case you can cause shorts as the wheels touch both sides. Not usually a problem on analogue, but can pose a problem with DCC and the short circuit cut outs on some control stations.

Does that help? My general reccomendation is to always allow you to add something later, if the time/financial cost at the outset isn't huge...

I have now retrofitted the points in the main station with a wire to the frog, I wish I had done this from the outset!

RMlive