About EZTronic
As fellow model railroaders, we believe that there are advancements in technology that can help achieve a better result for your layout than what is currently offered in the model railroad industry.
One area we believe can be improved is that of turnout motors and the installation and use of them in your layout. By this we mean both the technology as well as the process used to get such products properly installed in your layout. There certainly are products providing part of the solution. Slow motion switch machine motors work OK although they leave a lot for you to do to make them work to their full capability. We believe that there is an opportunity for a better and more complete solution for turnouts, one that provides everything you need to make the installation and operation of equipment at a turnout an enjoyable one. Of course, the solution must be reliable and of high quality to provide years of trouble-free enjoyment.
Turnout Control Solutions
Welcome to EZTronic Turnout Control solutions. We agonize over all the details so you can simply install and enjoy our products in your layout. Below are some of the key elements of our kit designs that we believe are unique and will provide reliable operation in your layout for years to come:
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- Servo motors– we use servo motors in our kits which are smaller than stall motors and operate with less overall power.
- Rugged metal geared servos – more rugged than traditional plastic-only servos, these servos are designed to provide years of trouble-free and quiet operation
- Customized servo brackets with template – no more guessing to get proper alignment of your machine from underneath your layout or table. We provide a simple, yet powerful way to align your servo machine exactly where you want it and align the location from the top of your layout where you can easily see how it is going to align with the turnout.
- Scalable solution – our kits come complete with support of up to 8 turnouts and provide everything you need. However, if you need more than 8, you can simply add additional kits and use your same power source for up to 40 turnouts!
- Maximum current – Many companies provide part of an answer for a turnout. Some provide a suitable stall motor, (usually able to mechanically switch up to 2A of current along with local relay contacts for LEDs and switch status). This is fine, however if you have a train that is drawing more than 2A of current (not uncommon on mid-sized or larger layouts), you will need to provide additional current handling around your turnouts for safe operation. In addition, wouldn’t it be nice if you had a motor that was not drawing its maximum current continuously after it has moved the switch to the end of its travel? Conversely, servo motors require significantly less current after they are positioned, so as your turnout needs grow, you will have much more headroom for expansion without the need for additional power.
- Pushbutton control & Indication– motor-only solutions do not provide an integrated solution to actuate the motor, or the means to see the status of all 8 turnouts immediately in one location. EZTronic went the extra mile and provides a Pushbutton-Indicator board as an integrated part of its kits. Now you have a user interface to control and monitor the status of all 8 turnouts with a simple plug-n-play wiring connection.
- Power for servo and relay – Many turnout motors operate at different voltages and it is not uncommon that such motors use 12V, while other devices or relays might use 5V. In our case, we use the power coming from your single power source (12V-16V AC or DC) and have thoughtfully provided headers on our controller board for all 8 of our servo motors as well as connections for all 8 relays (to accommodate the use of metal frog turnouts) with no additional power needed.
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- Unified bracket – When using relays to provide proper voltage operation for metal frogs, we provide specific custom designed brackets that hold both our servo motor and our relay in one unified bracket. Once you have located either type of our brackets (servo-only or servo and relay) with our provided template, you do not need to re-align the new integrated bracket in the future if you upgrade to metal frogged turnouts. The same location will work flawlessly. Just install the new bracket in the identical location.
- Installation at the turnout location – With present solutions, it generally is left up to you to figure out what you need to mount where, how to get wire there, how to provide power, etc. Our Turnout Control kits provide a neat way to mount all physical devices and make it easy to troubleshoot down the road. Our controller and pushbutton boards are provided with custom printed enclosures for easy mounting. Our custom brackets make it easy to mount either our servos or our servos and relays (used for metal frog turnouts) and they operate together automatically as a system. Just wire up the relay to our controller – the rest is handled automatically by the system including providing power.Â
- Short circuit detection – After studying the pros and cons of automatically switching power at the frog when a short is detected, we chose not to add or recommend this type of solution at a turnout. Why may you ask? There are a few different companies that offer autosensing of shorts at the frog and quickly switch the voltage to the proper one. Whereas the devices work as stated, there are times when these products can, or may, interfere with what some DCC control manufacturers do for detecting short circuits and safely shutting off power. What this means is that there can be situations where a turnout, using one of these auto-switching devices, senses a short circuit and starts to switch the voltage over to the correct one but does so slower than the DCC manufacturer’s circuit does. In such cases, the DCC system will sense the short first and shut your branch circuit or layout down.    This is not what you signed up for when you acquired the frog-reversing solutions.
- Optical isolation – we believe that a solution provider should use prudent design to reduce or eliminate damage that may occur when either excessive current or a short might appear on the layout. To this end, our relays are all optically coupled and isolated. What this means is that excessive current on the layout or a track circuit will not damage our relays. (side note –we also provide optical coupling and isolation on our Occupancy Detection boards which also helps prevent damage to those boards as well)
- Status for 3rd party software – Some model railroads have the desire or need for centralized display panels or LEDs. Other layouts may need to aggregate all signals and display them on monitors or computers in various locations on the layout. Our controller boards provide industry compatible signal status for each of our turnouts so you can meet the needs for knowing when a turnout’s route has been changed from normal to diverged or vice versa.
Initial Offerings
Our first kit offerings are Turnout Control solutions for the HO enthusiast. Shortly thereafter, we intend to expand our offerings to include N-scale kits as well. Please sign up for additional information so we can let you know when new kits become available. Also, feel free to reach out to us to share your thoughts on existing products as well as other product(s) that you might like to see us provide.
