In addition to picking up my Shinkansen, I took the opportunity while at Hobbytech to get a few more unitrack pieces. I decided to replace my Minitrix tracks with Kato unitrack for my railway station layout. The reason behind this decision was the smoother operation of the Kato turnouts. My trains were derailing over the Minitrix turnouts and they often stopped at the unpolarized frog. The other reason was that the solenoids are fitted inside the Kato turnout whereas Minitrix have their solenoids sticking out on the side of the turnout. It's somewhat of an eyesore. Some people have mounted the solenoids upside down and covered them with ballast to hide them. The architectural style of the railway station layout does not permit the use of ballast. If you look closely at the photograph, you can see the wiring that connects the turnouts to the Kato switches. The wires will be strung through a hole in the table top directly under the unitrack so they will not be visible. As you may have surmised, the operation will be entirely DC. I still haven't converted to DCC yet. Speaking of which, only the #4 Kato turnouts are DCC friendly. The #6 turnout and the double cross-over require some re-wiring to get them DCC compliant.
4 comments:
I'm hoping that my recent investment in Minitrix turnouts proves to be a wise one! Unfortunately, I've only come across your blog AFTER I've made the switch (their is precious little information about Minitrix in English). I did decide to invest the extra money and go with only polarized switches, so hopefully stalls will be reduced!
You made the better choice with the polarized frogs. Let me know how the Minitrix turnouts work out for you. I'm interested to find out if I just had a bad turnout. It was frustrating because my ICE3 would always derail on one of the turnouts. The plastic cross over was high. The edge of the wheels would roll on it and go in the wrong direction causing the derailment. I hope you don't have the same problem I experienced.
Me too! I'm a little curious to see how well the curved turnouts work, and I am going to try one of the double crossovers as well. I may be a bit spoiled given the good operating characteristics of Unitrack!
The only problems I've had with Unitrack is that the Unijoiners don't always guarantee a good/level fit of the rails. This is easy to fix, but can result in 'bumpy rides' if you miss it. I have had some difficulty with the 2 axle cars...not sure if its the Unitrack, or just the nature of those fixed axles.
I've noticed the same problem with the unitrack. I can hear the klackity klack sounds when running the trains at slow speed. It just forces me to run them at full speed. What do you do to correct the problem?
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