开云体育

The issue of power-routing frogs is twofold.

1) Insulated dead frogs of any kind (steel or plastic) leave dead spots in the track. Some locos will stall on them if wheel pick-up is marginal and you attempt to roll through the switch at slow speed. (Atlas and Peco Insulfrog) Powering the frog will help avoid that problem....But it must be at the correct polarity to avoid short circuits as a loco runs through the switch. Hense power routed frogs.

2) Some track switches have all metal frog points that are not insulated from the adjoining frog and/or point rails. (original Shinohara/Walthers for example). These switches MUST have power routing of the whole frog section as it is much too long to be dead track. They may or may not have a good built-in mechanism to perform polarity corrected power routing right out of the box. (Walthers do, Pilz don't) In either case, these switches require insulated rail joiners (or built-in rail gaps) to isolate the frog rails from other track.

The term "Power Routing" also refers to switching the polarity and/or powering the track rails leading away from the switch frog. For DC systems this was a convenient way of removing power from siding track for non-used loco storage. This is not necessarily desired when using DCC. In most cases the built-in method for selecting frog polarity does not form a robust trouble-free electrical connection. With DCC an accidental short ciucuit through the frog or rail points can actually damage the built-in switch. Adding a separate micro-switch to firmly connect the proper polarity can be tricky as it must switch connections when any built-in mechanism is open circuit.

DonV