Is there a particular gauge / length of wire needed to connect the power to a track? I connected my Railpower controller to my track with standard 14 gauge wire left over from a remodel and it works fine unless the wire is too long, which seemed strange.
Nope, there is not. A lot is personal preference. Some like stranded wire, some like single strand; some like 14 gauge, some like all the way down to 24 gauge. What works, is what is best, for you, for me, for everyone ;)
Except that my loco wouldn't run with a 3 ft length of wire (well it ran, but only within like 1 1/2 track sections of the feeder track. When I cut it down to 6 inches or less it worked fine.
is this wire stranded or solid?
wire has very little resistance, and the larger the wirer the less resistance there is. with 14 guage, it shouldn't make a difference what length it is. your 3 foot wire probably had some sort of problem connecting with the track, like a bad solder joint if you soldered it.
Agree with Jeff. If you really wanted to find the answer, run a resistence check on the section you cut off. That would tell you fer sher if the problem was that section of wire. Have a multi meter FX?
I do have a multimeter. I'll have to check the resistance when I get home tonight.
I was once working on a motor operator for a industrial rollup door, it was Brand new and gave me a headache with erratic operation, It turned out to be one of the jumpers looked fine on the outside but on the inside it was cut and just butted together, Very strange, I wouldn't think there would be a butt-splice like that in the run but weird things happen with automated manufacturing.
NM-jeff
That's also a reason to stay away from solid conductor wire. If it gets flexed enough in handling, the solid conductor can break inside the insulation, with no sign anythings wrong from the outside.
Len
A good point. One reason why I like to mostly use multi strand-even if a couple of strands get broken, you don't loose continuity. However, I do use single strand for switch machines because I have lots of it. I avoid handling it much, only just to strip the ends for the connections. If a strand stops working, no big deal, it will just get replaced. The layout is not huge enough that becomes very time consuming. Now, if I had to go buy the wire, I would buy multi strand.