Anyone use this style of turnout, I'm curious as to how well it works, is it fussy?

For the curious:

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I have one in HO. It works well for the limited use I give it.
I think the N one is a slightly different design, with the points staggered instead of right opposite. For one of the curved routes, both points have to be thrown.

I have an area I will b building soon in my nolix (modified helix with long stretches visible) in which I'd like to have three tracks side by side, to appear like holding sidings but really so I can stage two trains, not on the through track. This type of turnout would reduce the room needed for the sidings versus the traditional method of using two turnouts to achieve the same effect, but I'm hoping they aren't finicky and can handle a train "high balling" on the mainline.

I only know of one person who tried a three-way and he ended up taking it back out. His steam locos derailed constantly. The two diesels he had only derailed once in awhile. This was in a yard area were the speeds were very slow, I would think the problem would only get worse as the speed got faster. I don't know just how great his track laying skills were but everything run thru all the regular switches with no problems.

I have one in my yard. It works without failures for slow switching but the run is not smooth. I would not put it in a mail line etc.

It is the beast in the foreground on this older photo:

I thought about using one, but wiring isn't my strong suite so I elected top go a more conventional route.

MountainMan Wrote:I thought about using one, but wiring isn't my strong suite so I elected top go a more conventional route.

I was unsure how complicated wiring would be. But I can tell you it is not

1. There are three areas that need to powered by the switch machine. Sounds complicated but two areas are wired together and are powered from one switch machine. The third one goes to the other switch machine. That is easy ones you know which two belong together. I found a nice explanation in the web http://www.loystoys.com/peco/about-3-way-turnouts.html.
Quote: " At no time do the center and right frog have to have different polarities. They are either of the same polarity (Illustration 3) , or one or the other is irrelevant. This is how the right and middle frogs can be tied together to have the same polarity."

2. The middle four rails are switching polarity as the switch machines are set. Therefor those four rails need to be isolated from the attached tracks.
That is all about wiring

I was going to use one on my hump yard as the first turnout off the 'hill' yo evenly spread out the 10 tracks. Cost is one issue at around $45, it isn't cheap.
That link on wiring is dead. In fact their site appears to be down or not there.

Is this code 80 or 55, I'm using 55.

I did just now test the link. It works fine and fast

The link is dead for me as well.

This is another good explanation how to wire the 3-way turnout. I think there are even more on the web.

http://www.modelrailforum.com/forums/ind...topic=6380

ps. funny thing
the link to the page http://www.loystoys.com/peco/about-3-way-turnouts.html still works for me
but the link to the server only http://www.loystoys.com fails with no connection possible.

faraway; That link you provided, it was interesting to look at the 'counts' between the threads/posts in the N and HO forums. Basically equal between the two scales.
Also interesting was the high counts for 'OO' scale.