Bought the double turnout (sorry, forget exact product name) -two left-hand turnoust on parallel pieces of straight track allowing for crossover between lines. Anyway:

I had expected the two parallel sides to be electrically isolated, so that two lines sharing this piece for crossover purposes could be independently controlled. The dealer I bought from asserted this was indeed the case, and pointed out two small gaps in the rails in the crossover area that he thought would accomplish this purpose.

Well, not so. When hooking this up into my budding young layout, either transformer powered both lines. The direction setting for the switches made no difference in this regard. I tried powering/depowering the frogs to see if that made a difference, to no avail. Tried to see if I could unscrew and disassemble it to get one turnout of to replace the metal joiners in the center with plastic joiners. Found that the switches were in more firmly and connected to the guts of the switch, than I wished to mess with. Buttoned it up, and in the end decided to literally break out the metal joiners in the center. I was of course, unable to replace them with anything, but did find it necessary to use a few small dabs of Epoxy on one of the midsection rails that loosened up during my breaking efforts.

Is this performance of this fifty-dollar piece of track what is to be expected? I would have thought that isolation between the two sides would be almost universally preferred.

Last week, I purchased the Empire builder N set for my sons' and my use.

Question 1: Is the Santa Fe Northern that ships with this set the same model as that which  is sold separately? (not the N&W J-Class) I have read the Northern body shell review elsewhere in this forum, and observe some differences; e.g; that there is no power from the tender, etc.

Qustion 2. Is it possible to use the tender wheels to draw power? Is this reasonably feasible? ( I am more skilled than the average joe, having done some industiral electronics repair in times past, but since I did it for hire, I have no soldering/desoldering gun nor miniature soldering equipment; only a conventional soldering iron. If this is doable with less than heroic effort, can someone explain the procedure and parts needed?

Question 3. If the separately sold unit is different than the one in the set, does it draw power from any tender wheels? My unit stops or stutters a lot on joints in the EZ-track that came with the set; I would think that an additional power draw from the tender wheels would help with this.

Question 4. Does/has anyone else had the issue with the trailing truck (and fixed it)? The outer frame for the truck hangs so low that two downward projections at the extreme front and rear of the truck fram actually hang below track level. This catches and makes the lcomotive hang at the frogs of turnouts. Initially, I noticed that the  front of the trailing truck rode high, so that the front wheel pair wasn't really touching the track. I loosened the screw at the front of the tuck to get the front lower, hoping it also might raise the rear of the truck, since the aforementioned projection overhangs past the rear wheels. Alas, it did get the front wheel pair onto the rails, but now I have projections hanging below the track bo that the front AND rear of the trailing truck.

In summary, I guess I see that the latest generation of the Northern has, in the past, been considered a good unit, but I find this starter set unit problematic, and I wonder if if Bachmann makes better, or if it can be made better,