Troubleshooting Marx remote turnouts

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , , , , , ,

Yesterday I hooked up Dad’s old Marx O27 remote turnouts, and again found one of them dodgy.
I can’t find any troubleshooting information about Marx O gauge switches online. I went to the library and checked out all the toy train repair books I could find. Nothing. One of Ray L. Plummer’s books offered advice on repairing Lionel turnouts. But the Marx turnouts are slightly different. Emboldened, I set off on my own.

Before you destroy what little collector value your switches have (The words “switch” and “turnout” are often used interchangeably; forgive me if I try to feed Google to get more traffic), let me tell you how to test them first. All you need your turnout(s) (don’t connect them–just keep them loose), two pieces of wire, and a transformer. I used a 25-watt Marx transformer from an entry-level train set I bought off eBay for $20. This eliminates the control panel, track, and everything else from the equation. Of course, you should use a transformer that you already know to be in working order.

Some transformers have posts for both trains and accessories. Some (like the one I used) don’t. Don’t worry about it; we’ll just use the train posts for this exercise.

Don’t plug the transformer in yet. Run a wire from the center post of the turnout (sometimes labeled “B” or “black,” although not on Dad’s) to one of the posts on your transformer. Connect another wire to the other post, but leave the other end loose.

Now, before you plug in your transformer, please keep in mind that you’re working with electricity and use common sense. Keep your hands dry, don’t do this if you’re bleeding, etc. I’m not responsible for what happens next, OK? If you’ve never done anything like this before, take it to a hobby shop and let a pro handle it–a switch that will cost you $15 on eBay in working order isn’t worth personal injury. Or you can buy a new Lionel or K-Line switch from the local hobby shop for $30-$35. Yes, a 50-year-old Marx turnout is worth less than a new one from Lionel or K-Line. That’s the way it goes sometimes.

Got all that? Good. Still with me? Great. Plug in the transformer. Turn it on. Switches like to run at 16-20 volts AC, so crank the transformer’s lever to full speed. Touch the loose wire to either of the outer posts on the switch. Then pick it up and touch it to the other one. Alternate between the two a few times.

If the accessory is still in working order, the track should change positions based on which post you touched the wire to. If it doesn’t, there’s probably a loose or frayed wire somewhere inside.

If the switch works this way but not when you connect the Marx control panel, your control panel is dodgy. I read on The All-Gauge Model Railroading Page that Atlas controllers for their HO turnouts work fine with Marx O27 turnouts. I also read in the same place that Lionel and K-Line controllers will not.

You can also pick up a Marx control panel on eBay. I saw one sell for $5 this past weekend.

Or if you’re handy with wiring, you ought to be able to fashion your own with a couple of push buttons or momentary switches from your local Radio Shack or equivalent–just make sure whatever switches you buy can handle 20-24 volts of current. (Always over-engineer on this kind of stuff.) If you want to go this route and you’ve never done any model railroading wiring before, pick up one of the books on wiring Lionel/Marx/American Flyer layouts–many hobby shops, larger bookstores, and even a lot of libraries have them–and follow its precautions. I’m not responsible for whatever happens if you go this route.

How do you fix a Marx control panel? It’s held shut by four rivets, so opening it for cleaning isn’t an easy endeavor. I fixed my dodgy control panel by blasting some Radio Shack TV tuner cleaner ($9 for a big can) into the openings, then flipping the unit over a few times to get it circulating, then working all four of the buttons. Seeing as the switch is little more than a couple of handfuls of contact points, there’s a decent chance that’ll take care of you. There really isn’t much inside there that can go wrong.

If TV tuner cleaner doesn’t help, it’s probably corrosion. You can open it up and clean any and all electrical contacts with a piece of 600-grit sandpaper, or fashion replacements from some conductive material (copper foil would be best, but aluminum would work). But you’re on your own from here.

If the switch doesn’t work, period, there’s probably a loose or frayed wire somewhere inside. Fortunately, there are only five wires inside.

Opening the switch’s case is a bit of a chore. It’s held shut by two rivets, easily found by flipping the turnout over and looking for indentations. Disconnect the outside wires and power off your transformer (of course). The proper tool to remove rivets isn’t exactly a household item (at least not in mine), so you can do what I did: Pinch the edges of each rivet with a pair of needle-nose pliers until it pushes through the case. The bottom should then come right off. You’ll notice three screws inside. There should be a wire connected to each. Overzealous loosening of the nuts on the top of the case followed by some jostling can loosen those wires. Tighten the screws (if they’re severely corroded, you might consider replacing them). If any of the wires appear frayed, replace them, or have someone handy with a soldering iron replace them.

If you find wires detached from screws and want to keep it from happening again, you can solder the wires to the screws, but this is probably overkill.

The small box on the top of the switch is held in place by six or so tabs on the bottom of the unit. This houses the electromagnet. You can gain access by gently bending the tabs with a small slotted screwdriver. Check to make sure those three wires are still soldered in place. The biggest place for something to go wrong on a Marx turnout is over by those screws it uses for terminals, however, so chances are there’s nothing wrong over in the electromagnet’s neighborhood.

Closing up shop can be as easy or difficult as you like. Since I don’t care about collector value on a pair of switches that might fetch $25, tops, on eBay, I replaced the rivets with a pair of very thin and short machine screws. If you care about collector value, procure a pair of small brass rivets to replace the two you just ruined.

The end of the world will be October 3, 2002! Make that Jan. 17, 2003! Er…

Dave Farquhar Christianity

A lot of Christians today are really wrapped up in the so-called “end times” issues. It’s a natural curiosity, and in a way, healthy. Jesus told us to be ready for it.
I’m amazed sometimes at what you hear in regards to the end times, however. I’m not just talking Left Behind here. One member of my church said to me, in all seriousness, back in September 2002 (I only remember because it was within a few days of when I bought my house) that none of us would be here in six months, so nothing really matters. She and her husband talk frequently about their upcoming retirement and moving to the Lake of the Ozarks, so I figured she was referring to that. She was not. She was referring to the end of the world.

This surprised me. One, it was coming from a Lutheran. Two, it was coming from a long-time Lutheran. Three, it was coming from a long-time Lutheran with a dizzying amount of church involvement (among other things, her husband has been an elder in our church). Four, it was coming from a highly intelligent woman with a PhD.

Let me talk about this first just from a purely historical perspective, since I’m an armchair historian of sorts. Jesus’ 11 surviving disciples believed they were living in the last days. Jesus had, after all, told them that some among them would not taste death before the arrival of the Kingdom of God. They thought He was talking about his second coming. St. Paul thought he would see the second coming.

Some people believe we are living in the Tributation today (the period of time described in Revelation). I count myself among that group. But I also believe that the tributation has been going on for more than 1,000 years. While Christians are being persecuted today, persecuting Christians was a national pastime in Rome. Killing Christians was literally a sport. Is the present day really more tribulating than the days of Rome?

Certainly, I believe the end of the world could come today. It might come before I finish writing this, or before you finish reading it. But it’s equally likely that we’ll go on for another 2,000 years.

Jesus said even He didn’t know when the end of the world would be. If Jesus didn’t know, then who are we to try to say we know?

We won’t. Think back to the Parable of the Ten Girls. Ten were waiting for the bridegroom (Christ) to come back. Five were prepared and five were not. That’s the lesson most people take from it. But read it more closely. When the time came, all ten were asleep. Not one of them saw it coming.

There are much more important things for us to concern ourselves with.

The economics of color inkjets vs. color lasers

Dave Farquhar Hardware ,

Deciding between a color inkjet versus a color laser is tough for me. So I decided to sit down and do the math, and the results were exactly the opposite of what I expected.
The least expensive color laser printer on the market is the Minolta-QMS Magicolor 2300W. It’s $650 with a $200 rebate. It should also be noted it’s a Windows-only printer, which I don’t like since I frequently run Linux, and I might like to run Gimp and Sodipodi on Linux and print to my color printer. So for Linux use (and faster printing on the Windows side), I’d have to step up to the Magicolor 2300DL, which is $100 extra. The Minoltas have excellent resolution for their class (1200×1200, as opposed to 600×600 in most competing printers) and the toner gives a waxy, photograph-like shine.

While it’s surprisingly easy to find a color inkjet for less than $40, the least-expensive color inkjet I would be willing to consider is the Epson Stylus C64, because it’s the least expensive inkjet I know of that has separate cartridges for all four colors. And, while slow, it offers excellent resolution (5760×1440 dpi). But the slightly higher-priced Epson Stylus C84 gets better reviews (and I’ve seen the C84). I’ll base the comparison on the C64, but since the two printers use the same cartridges and I’m projecting total costs over a long period of time, the price difference between the C64 and C84 is negligible.

The reviews of the Minolta that I’ve seen complain about the cost of the consumables. While the cartridges are expensive ($150 per pop), this criticism doesn’t take into account the cost per page. While the cost of inkjet cartridges is easier to swallow, inkjets are notorious for their high cost per page. So the right question to ask is which printer is cheaper over the long term?

A set of Minolta cartridges will cost $384. A set of cartridges will yield approximately 4,500 pages. Divide 384 by 4,500, and you come up with a cost of 8.53 cents per page, not counting the paper.

Epson cartridges cost $12.34 each, and you need four of them. They yield approximately 400 pages per cartridge. Multiply 12.34 by 4, then divide by 400, and you come up with a cost of 12.34 cents per page, not counting the paper.

The Minolta 2300DL costs $550, while the Epson C64 costs $57. So the price difference is $493. A page printed by the Minolta costs 3.81 cents less than a page printed by the Epson. So divide 493 by 0.0381, and you’ll have to print 12,389 pages for the Minolta to come up cheaper.

If you can live with Windows-only printing, the 2300W comes out ahead after 10,315 pages.

There’s an additional cost with the Minolta, however: The drum unit needs to be replaced every so often. The worst-case scenario, if you do a lot of single-page prints, is 10,000 pages. That’s $150, which means another 3,900 pages you’ll need to print in order to come out ahead.

I guarantee the Epson will break down faster than the Minolta, but seeing as the Epson costs $8 more than a set of its ink cartridges (and includes a set of cartridges), I’m willing to call that a wash, especially in light of the Minolta’s higher power consumption and heat generation while printing. How much the Minolta will increase your electric bill is an unknown, as is the number of times the Epson will need to be replaced. (But most people I know who have had a computer for five years and print a lot have gone through 2-3 inkjet printers.)

Seeing as I go through 3-4 reams of paper a year, tops, it would take the Minolta five years to pay for itself. And that brings up another problem. Have you ever tried to buy supplies for a five-year-old laser printer? In five years, I’m much more likely to have to pay full retail for the supplies ($125 for the cartridges, and $170 for the drum unit), if I can find them at all. Chalk up another 4,000 pages due to probable increased costs.

If you primarily print photos, the economics change slightly. These numbers are based on 5% coverage. Photos tend to cause printers to guzzle ink five times as quickly as they would printing things like web pages, so if your primary intent is to print photos, divide those page counts by four or five. That brings me closer to my range, but not quite close enough.

So I’ve reached a surprising conclusion for myself: For color printing, I’m better off with an Epson inkjet.

I do expect the cost of color lasers to continue to drop, but what that tells me is that when the Epson breaks or after a couple of years, I should re-evaluate. But until color lasers drop below the $350 mark or my printer usage increases dramatically, a color laser just doesn’t make sense for me.

Reports on the death of film are [you know the rest]

Dave Farquhar Photography ,

Giddy Slashdotters are proclaiming the death of film since Kodak has announced it’s not going to sell film cameras anymore, at least not in the United States and Europe.
It proves to me that whoever wrote that story summary knows little or nothing about serious photography.

For many years, Kodak was a big name in serious photography. But come the 1960s, you started seeing serious cameras from a lot of other manufacturers. For the duration of my lifetime, Kodak cameras were pretty much relegated to the casual point-and-shoot arena.

But meanwhile, Kodak remained one of the largest producers of film. It remains so today. Go into any store and look for film, and the two brands you’re most likely to find are Kodak and Fuji.

Serious photographers have only recently begun to prefer digital. Some serious photographers still prefer the look of film. Pictures shot on film have a different look from digital shots, and they probably always will. Neither type of camera’s view on reality is necessarily more correct, but they’re certainly different, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly.

Casual photographers like digital point-and-shoots because they can take hundreds of pictures and only print out (and thus only pay for) the good ones. And there’s the perception among certain laypeople that digital is always better. CDs sound better than cassettes, so digital pictures will look better than film, right? That’s what the girl I was dating a year ago thought, and I never convinced her otherwise.

The money is in disposable cameras, film, and digitals. There’s just not much money to be made in the traditional point-and-shoots–too many companies are making them, and the margins are too thin. So Kodak is concentrating on the areas where it can make money. And Kodak can make a lot of money selling $150 digital cameras to people year over year (people will want to upgrade so they can make bigger prints, after all), or disposable cameras to people who forget to pack a camera, or film to people buying razor-thin-margin cameras made by someone else.

Once you can buy a $40 digital camera with resolution comparable to film, you’ll be able to declare film dead. But you can’t do that yet, and you won’t be able to for a few more years.

But I’m sure you already knew all of this, so I’m not sure why I’m writing this. But I feel better now.

Myths about the 1904 World’s Fair

Dave Farquhar St. Louis
Myths about the 1904 World’s Fair

The 1904 World’s Fair was the stuff of legends, especially in St. Louis. St. Louis has a bit of an inferiority complex, so the 1904 World’s Fair gives it a rare point of pride. But there are a number of myths surrounding the 1904 World’s Fair. Let’s look at three of them: the ice cream cone, hot dog, and hamburger.

According to legend, the ice cream cone, hot dog, and hamburger as we know it today were all invented at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. But in all three cases, there are earlier examples in history, though one can make a case that the 1904 World’s Fair helped popularize all three.

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I hope someday I’ll understand this model railroad electronics page

Dave Farquhar Toy trains

Rob Paisley has a page of model railroad circuitry, including, most interestingly to me, a driver for stepper motors. You’d use stuff like this if you wanted to have people moving around inside your buildings, or if you wanted other moving parts on your layout.
I used to build electronic circuits, when I was a sophomore and junior in high school. It’s been so long now that I don’t even remember what all of the symbols mean. It’s almost sad.

But the good news for me is that I’ll be able to build all kinds of cool stuff once I figure it out. I’ve got lots of old 5.25-inch floppy drives in my basement, with stepper motors ripe for harvesting. A stash of 5.25-inch floppy drives with amber LEDs would be a railroad scratchbuilder’s dream, wouldn’t it?

Making two-part plaster molds

Dave Farquhar Toy trains ,

One of the station platforms from Dad’s old Lionel set only has one of its three supports. I could possibly track down new ones, or fashion new ones out of wood or some other material, but the easiest thing to do would be to just cast two new ones, using the first one as the original.
This guide to two-part plaster molds is written with action figure parts in mind, but the same principle applies for any solid three-dimensional object.

Keep in mind it’s illegal to do any of this stuff except for your own personal use, unless, of course, you’re casting copies of something you made yourself.

Linux kernel 2.6.0 is in Debian Unstable

Dave Farquhar Linux

Fresh on the heels of the Linux Kernel 2.6.1 release, Kernel 2.6.0 made it into Debian Sid (unstable). I haven’t tried it yet, as I messed things up on my main Linux box when I tried to upgrade to a pre-release version of 2.6.
I really ought to put a Linux partition on my Athlon system and upgrade it to Debian Unstable with a 2.6 kernel.

For those of you who currently have a working Debian box, it might be apt-get upgrade time. See why I like Debian? You can upgrade to all the latest stuff with, at worst, two commands: apt-get update and apt-get upgrade, or apt-get update and apt-get distupgrade. No chasing down RPMs and dependencies, no waiting around for stuff to compile and wondering if it’ll work on your system. It lets you be cutting edge, yet conservative.