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What is the difference between insulated and live frogs on turnouts?
When choosing turnouts for your layout, you may have noticed there is a choice between turnouts with insulated frogs (sometimes called insulfrogs) and turnouts with live frogs (known as electrofrogs), so what's the difference?
Model railway tracks use one rail to carry power to your model and the other rail to complete the circuit from your model back to the controller. Without this completed circuit, the current would not flow and your model would not work. So far so good.
The problem comes when the tracks reach a turnout or diamond crossing. At this point, the diverging outer rail physically crosses the inner rail, and without insulation, a short circuit would occur. This exact point on a turnout (where the outer and inner rails meet) is called the frog. On insulated turnouts, the frog is made from plastic to ensure the metal of the outer and inner rails never actually make contact. These kinds of turnout are very easy to use and allow modellers to connect tracks and turnouts with little consideration to the current flow.
A turnout with a live frog has metal rails throughout. This has the benefit of continuous conductivity resulting in the increased reliability of locomotives using the turnout. Of course, this means the outer and inner rails do now make contact at the frog, and to avoid a short circuit, the turnout must be isolated elsewhere. This is usually done using insulated rail joiners where the turnout is connected to the tracks on either side.
But installing insulated rail joiners will cause the turnout to be completely void of current. The solution is to connect dedicated power feeds to the turnout thus making it powered, but independent from surrounding trackwork.
This all sounds rather complicated and unnecessary, but the increased reliability of locomotives using the turnouts makes a little learning well worth it, and once you have wired one, you'll wonder what all the fuss was ever about.
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