Mystery Power Outage - A Turnout Fail

 So this happened . . .

I recently discovered while running my DERS-1b across this turnout that it would stall every time. After checking the wheels and rails for dirt, I used my "poor man's continuity tester" (a bulb & two alligator clips) to check that all rails were getting power.

Strangely, as you can see from the video above, one of the outside/stock rails was NOT getting power - at least not all the time. That's not too strange - I figured I might have to add a feeder to that rail - but what was really strange is that, as I would run the clip down the rail, it would get power and lose power. And it's all one solid piece of rail!

Thankfully, I was on the Wednesday Night AML Chat and showed the folks there (literally from all around the world) what was going on and I think it was Mark from Australia that first suspected a faulty rail joiner. Actually, BOTH rail joiners at each end of this rail weren't making solid contact - and thus not providing continuous power.

Turns out, as I would slide the clip along the rail, as I got closer to the rail joiner - and was pressing down - contact would be made.

So this is what having two rail joiners fail at the same time looks like. Who knew?

Well, I do now - and now so do you!

As a temporary fix, I tightened the rail joiners and all is well for now. But the longer term solution will be to add a feeder to this rail. And while I'm at it, I'll probably go ahead and add a feeder to the other stock rail (the closure rails already have a jumper soldered between them and the stock rails). And do the same thing for the other turnouts. . . Ugh.

I guess I should have just added feeders to the turnouts before installing them. But at least now I know what a failure looks like and can fix them as needed.

Hopefully this little writeup will help someone else out - and if you've ever had this happen, let us know in the comments!