Rails connected in Bachmann crossings?

[Terry Toenges]

Are the rails in the "diamond" in Bachmann crossings connected to the outer tracks? I'm trying to figure out how to keep my trolleys from stalling at the crossings.

[jward]

Are the rails in the "diamond" in Bachmann crossings connected to the outer tracks? I'm trying to figure out how to keep my trolleys from stalling at the crossings.

Not sure about EZ track, but I know the Atlas ones are jumpered through the diamond. Have you checked them with an ohmmeter? Ig the diamond rails are live then they should read 0 Ohms all along the same rail. If yours are not live, assuming yours are nickle silver you can solder the necessary jumpers to power them.

[Terry Toenges]

I can't find my VOA meter. I've looked high and low. I'm guessing someone borrowed it. I was hoping they aren't so I could solder some jumpers.

[Terry Toenges]

The rails in the diamond are "hot". I use my test light to check them.

[jward]

The rails in the diamond are "hot". I use my test light to check them.

I thought they might be, but I wasn't certain. since that is the case, your issues with trolleys losing contact is probably due to their short wheelbase. Not much you can do about that if you run single cars, but if you run them in pairs you might wire them together so that one car can feed power to the other. Or if your trolley has two trucks see if it is picking up from all wheels or just the power truck.
 

[Ralph S]

Okay.  Silly me, but can anyone explain to me what a "diamond" is on the crossing?  I don't understand.  It is the track, or crossing signal...

[Terry Toenges]

The center part of the crossing.

[jward]

Okay.  Silly me, but can anyone explain to me what a "diamond" is on the crossing?  I don't understand.  It is the track, or crossing signal...

I think you're confusing the road crossing with the track crossing. We are referring to the track crossings. They don't have crossing signals.

[Ralph S]

Okay-got it, it's not a road/track crossing.  I'm sorry, if it's a track crossing, then where is this "diamond"?   I see X's, I see lines crossing, but I don't see a "diamond"?

[trainman203]

It's the name for the square area enclosed between all four rails where they cross. On the prototype, a 90° crossing is extremely rare. Most crossings are at some kind of angle which renders the area between those rails as a parallelogram, or a "diamond."  The closest I ever saw to an actual 90° Square was back home at the West Tower where the MP crossed the T&NO at what might've been an 80° angle, not quite 90°.  You'd be hard-pressed to call that very near-square space between the rails at that place a "diamond", but that's what the railroads called it.

[Ralph S]

 Thanks for clarifying that.  I just wonder if the railroads call that parallelogram... a diamond, what would they call a real diamond?
 

[trainman203]

They used to sometimes call coal "diamonds."  I haven't heard it or seen it in a long time, but steam firemen were sometimes called diamond shovelers or something like that.  Plus there was the term blue diamond that I think sometimes meant coal.  Someone from the coal regions like Jeffrey Ward will have to elucidate on that.

[Len]

I've always related "Blue Diamond" to the strike anywhere wood matches that had a blue diamond on the box they came in.

Len

[jward]

They used to sometimes call coal "diamonds."  I haven't heard it or seen it in a long time, but steam firemen were sometimes called diamond shovelers or something like that.  Plus there was the term blue diamond that I think sometimes meant coal.  Someone from the coal regions like Jeffrey Ward will have to elucidate on that.

The term is black diamonds, and comes from the fact that both coal and diamonds are forms of carbon. Lehigh Valley, one of the bog carriers of Anthracite (clean) coal named its premier passenger train the "Black Diamond." Geologically speaking, it takes intense heat and pressure to turn carbon into diamonds. Even though Pennsylvania is home to areas where such heat and pressure literally turned rock plastic and deformed it into spectacularly bent rock formations, in those areas most of the coal deposits burned off in the process long before they could become diamonds. What didn't burn off in those regions became Anthracite or hard coal. Those places subject to less extreme folding are underlaid with multiple layers of bituminous (soft) coal deposits. So I wonder exactly what conditions coal would have to be subject to in order to turn into diamonds. Apparently those conditions didn't exist here.