Joe Fugate’s use of 1156 lamps for short management.
Using
an 1156 auto tail light bulb is extremely effective in this application, and
will cost you only about $1 per turnout.
Or
you can take an alternative approach and protect train-length subblocks within a single power district using the 1156
bulbs.
I
demo the train-length subblock method in this video
clip:
http://mymemoirs.net/preview.php
I
have maybe 25 such train blocks on the layout but I have over 120 turnouts. It
was far cheaper to use one 1156 bulb per train block than one 1156 bulb per
turnout, but the operational effect is the same:
shutdown due to shorts on my DCC layout are *gone*.
The
1156 bulbs don't stop the short, they "manage" the short, becoming
the load when a short happens, making it so the power booster doesn't see the
short since it's merely a change in load from the train to the
1156 bulb. This is unlike Tony's power shields, which shutdown
the power to the track when a short happens.
In
practical terms, an 1156 bulb is far cheaper than a power shield and it
prevents a short from shutting down the power booster, which allows the rest of
the power district to keep running.
My
operators used to all know exactly where all the power district boundaries were
because things would go down whenever someone ran a turnout or derailed badly.
Now with the 1156 bulbs, no one even remembers where the power district
boundaries are because they don't matter. If some guy shorts things, just his
train quits running.
--Joe
Fugate