There must be thousands of questions here on TB for terminal blocks and I just never really saw the need for them since they weren’t visible. It just didn’t make much sense to me because I just soldered drop down wires from the rails to a main bus wire running around the layout anyway. Then I saw this 2 pole 8 terminal blocks on eBay and suddenly I was interested because you don’t have to install jumpers between all the' like poles'. Anyway I struggled with the notion for over a month and finally decided to give in at least for my O-Scale layout since it was always just thrown together for it’s once a year bash. So I’m rewiring my O scale Christmas Layout before putting it up for the summer to make it easier to set up next Christmas. And since I’m always changing the layout, I decided to use these terminal blocks to replace my old connections. TO Anyway I'm not trying to promote anything, I just think it’s worth mentioning just in case anybody might be interested.
Dissapointed in Wire Size but still like the idea. OK so I received my order of these terminal blocks a few days ago and I was a little disappointed. I still like the design of so I decide to use larger wires. But when I opened it up and saw the actual way it was wired with a few strands of wire no larger than a hair I knew I could not recommend it to anybody without being modified. I increased the wiring size to #18 solid copper which runs all my trains without any problem. I know a lot of you like go much higher, but I’ve never found an advantage to that on my small layout. You could probably go as high as #14, but it would be a tight fit getting it together. So just a warning before anybody buys these.
I like those but I have a question for you. Can they be split, as in 4 + 4 for one set of wire and 4+4 for a different set of wires? I mean like feeders on one set of 4 and lights or turnouts on the other 4. The terminal blocks I use now I can do that with just by splitting the jumper or using a short jumper. David
Yes you could but there isn't a whole lot of room for a lot of wires although you could easily get 2 #18s in each side of the block. I'm using them for my O-Scale Christmas layout where I have 8 track connections around the 6x8ft oval. It appeared from the eBay photo to be absolutely perfect for me because I didn't want to do any soldering and I also wanted an easy way to connect the track up each season without mixing up the wires. So unfortunately the small wire inside the block itself wasn't large enough for my Lionel trains and I had to solder anyway.
