04-21-2018, 08:53 PM
You should not need to have live frogs on your turnouts. We use live frogs on all of our switches in the modular club because we have some Thomas and friends trains for the kids to run and be entertained. Since Thomas is a very short wheel base locomotive, it would stall on a dead frog. If all of your locomotives have a long enough wheel base to always have at least one axle picking up power on live rail, you should not have any problems. A quick test is to park a locomotive with the frog centered underneath. If your wheel base is long enough to straddle the frog completely, you don't need live frogs. If you have an 0-4-0 saddle tank switch engine that was a popular engine in train sets in the 1960's, you would need a live frog. I think even a Bachmann 44 tonner has enough wheelbase to use a dead frog.