Tortoise Installation

The club's layout has over 220 Tortoise-brand switch motors installed. It is essential that installation be reliable and servicing easy.

We originally used edge connectors which slid on to the Tortoise circuit board, but we encountered several problems after the first 50 or so were installed:

• 8-pin connectors were impossible to find, so we were cutting larger connectors down to size - extra work
• even though we inserted guides in the shortened connectors, we found crossed connections between pins, resulting in hard-to-find problems with track power and switch machine power
• since the connectors were hanging vertically from a vibrating motor, they tended to work loose

Our electrical hero, Joost van Ens, replaced all of the existing edge connectors with the locking headers shown below, and he ensures that all new Tortoises are fitted with headers before they get anywhere near the layout.

The right-angle header is soldered to the pins of the Tortoise edge connector at the workbench.	The connector can be removed easily for debugging or repair.