Point Motor Shoot-Out, Final

It’s been a long time coming, but the saga of my point motors had to come to a conclusion eventually. You may recall that I played around with surface-mounted solenoid motors, found them to be inadequate, and decided to look at slow-action motors. That’s pretty much where things stalled.

I have, for a while, had a set of surface-mounted slow-action motors, which have operated to my satisfaction. These motors, the Cobalt SS ¹ from DCC Concepts, are fairly small and unobtrusive, and are operated by a separate controller board, on which all controls and settings are present.

As I committed to my track plan, one thing became painfully obvious: I would not be able to use these motors everywhere on my layout. Unlike the solenoid motors I tried, which sit close to the track and are mounted lengthwise, the Cobalt SS is installed perpendicular, and this requires more space next to the tracks. Since a fair amount of my track sits close to the edge of the table, below-board motors were the only option.

The market for ready-to-run slow action motors is fairly small. A lot of people use standard servos and specially programmed accessory decoders, but I wasn’t in the market for that level of fiddliness. That pretty much leaves the choice between the Circuitron product line, which consists of the Tortoise and it’s DCC-enabled counterpart Smail, and DCC Concepts’ Cobalt line.

The Tortoises are monsters which need a minimum 82mm clearance below the board to mount (3 1/4 inches). Out of the box they require the wires to be soldered onto their terminals, though third party solder-free terminals are available. If intended for DCC, the Tortoises must be operated with external decoders, none of which are made by Circuitron themselves. The Smail integrates DCC logic, but is less widely available than the Tortoise – none of the local Circuitron resellers carry it.

One thing the Tortoises have going for them is their reputation. It’s absolutely impeccable. They are renowned for reliability and carry a lifetime warranty. Something that DCC Concepts must have struggled with, at least for some time, because the sum of all the feedback I can find about these motors can only be described as ‘mixed’.

But it wasn’t mixed enough to deter me, because the Cobalt line has plenty of things going for it, too. One is their wider variety of options. They offer below-board motors in three versions (digital and analog), as well as the above mentioned surface motors. DCC decoders for the analog options are also available directly from DCC Concepts. Lastly, their documentation and support are superior to Circuitron’s, whose website is, for all intents and purposes, stuck in the late 1990s. And then of course, there’s availability – a number of domestic retailers have stock of the Cobalts in all their variations.

So I took the plunge and ordered a 12-pack of Cobalt IP Digital motors with integrated DCC logic. They’ve been sitting on my workbench for a short while, and at the time of writing, I have installed and wired up eight of them. Out of the 12 points on my layout, ten will be operated by these motors, which leaves me two spares. The other two points are/will be equipped with the surface motors. That’s the point on the upper part of the layout, as well as the exit to the long siding on the eastern side. That one sits directly above a cross brace, so I can’t put a below-board motor there.

So far these motors are operating as intended, but they’re not perfect. I have noticed some variations in their throwing speeds, and some sound more strained than others. Their throw rods, which are essentially pieces of 0.8mm piano wire, can handle a fair bit of flex, so the motor will operate a short while beyond the turnout being fully thrown before it stalls. Thicker wire might alleviate that issue. As far as their durability goes, only time will tell.

One thing that all slow action motors have in common is that they don’t work well with the over-centre springs commonly installed in points. These springs provide a proper end state for points operated with solenoid motors, which themselves have no end state. But for the operation with slow action or stall motors, these springs are too stiff, and need to be removed. This was an easy thing to do with the majority of my points, where I was able to remove the springs with the point in place on the layout. Two of my points are from a different manufacturer and have a setup that required me to remove the points from the layout in order to disable their springs. Luckily both of those points are in the yard on the eastern side of the layout, and their removal cause no hassle.

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1. I do wish companies could refrain from using this letter combination as a product name