ModelRailroadForums.com is a free
Model Railroad Discussion Forum and
photo gallery. We cover all scales and sizes of model railroads. Online since 2002, it's one of the oldest and largest model railroad forums on the web. Whether you're a master model railroader or just getting started, you'll find something of interest here.
I installed the crossing gates and one motor today. I wired one of the 2 Logicrail units yesterday. I found out right away there’s more wires than the board has inputs for. You can see in the gate motor photo there’s a little crimp in control wire for the up and down movement the gate. They ask you to put that there to give it a little expansion. I didn’t exactly do it as they asked because it was very hard to move under the layout, but it does work perfectly. The gates look great moving up and down or should I say gate. I haven’t hooked up the second one yet maybe tomorrow. I tried to take a photo of the crossing lights, but the camera isn’t fast enough to catch one side working at once so rather than all the lights being on, I turned the lights off and took the photo.
NYC_George
George, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by more wires than the board has inputs for. The gate itself should only have a rod to move it up and down, with no additional wires. The Tortoise should only require two input wires to the LR board. All the other wires should be from the IR track detectors and the crossing flashers. Since you've got a total of eight LED's on each flasher, you may have to double up some of those wires to the flasher output but that shouldn't be a problem. I don't know why Walthers would want you to have kink in the wire rod either, since having the wire rod as straight as possible usually produces the best results. I've never worked with that style of Walthers crossing gate though, so they may do something different than other gates I've work with, particularly because they are so long. Nice wiring job, in any case.
Jim the reason I said there were more wires than inputs is because there’s 7 wires that need to be wired to the + DC impute on the board, 4 + IR wires with resistors, 2 + crossing light wires and 1 + power supply. The ground side has 5 wires, 4 IR grounds and 1 power supply ground. The indicator side of the IR have 4 imputes on the board. If there’s a problem, which there was, each wire must be removed one by one in a number of different tests to find the cause. I found out right away with all the wires attached to 1 or 2 imputes this becomes a big pain so I added the additional terminals. Later on after all the testing, I found the wiring was fine. The problem was with the IR’s. I seated them to high causing indicator faults. They have to be set at tie level and no higher.
I attached a photo of the Walther’s mounting instructions for the gates. I wasn’t going to follow the instructions but decided they know better than I do. The lights and gates look great. I’ll be doing a video very soon.
Maybe you can help me with this? I have another crossing just up the road a bock away. I need to install a second Logicrail board for track one but not for this crossing. I’m wondering if I can use this second board to power the gates and lights for the second crossing.
NYC_George
I did a similar install on a club module a few years ago. I used 3 Detector circuits for a 2 track main and yard track, Bell Circuit and speaker, and crossing control circuit and 2 tortoise switch machines.
Mark looks good. I see you have some kind of control rods attaching the switch machines to the gates. I may need to do that for one gate that's in a tight space. There custom made or you bought them?
George
The Brackets and lever are from Circuitron.
Affiliate Disclosure: We may receive a commision from some of the links and ads shown on this website
(Learn More Here)
