you may have a Realtrax switch that was wired wrong internally. Back in 2000 or 2001 some of them came through with the wrong leads soldered to the micro switches inside.

With Realtrax you basically have the center rail and an outside with power, not both outside rails. In your situation both outside rails on both sides of the switch are getting energized. This makes the switch think that an engine is approaching and it sets off the non-derailing action.

So you need to isolate the switch from one side or the other. Do that by bending back the copper tabs and grinding down the rails slightly so that they don't make contact on one side of the switch.

If you look closely at how your layout is setup you will see that you are feeding the outside rail on both the inside of the loop and the outside. That is the source of the problem.

Example: If you had a loop of track on the floor and you insert a RealTrax lockon on the inside of the loop and you put a lockon on the outside of the loop, you would have supplied power to both the inside outer rail and the outside outer rail. That's ok as long as you don't have a switch anywhere in the loop. If you did have a switch, you could have power either on the inside or the outside but not both. The fact that you have it on both now is what is causing your problem.

1. If rails are 1, 2 3 with 2 being the center. I have power to 1 and 2 and one location and 2 and 3 at another. So simlply making sure I just supply power to 1 and 2 throughout the entire layout will not require isolating the switches?

2. If I have a reverse loop, which is where the switch I described is located. I need to isolate. But in this case would I just need to isolate the two inner rails like the lionel 072 switches or is it better to isolate all three rails on one side?

Answer to question 1 is yes.

Answer to question 2 is:I had to do all three on mine to get it to work properly. It was not a reverse loop, but where an inside loop met an outside loop of track for a cross over. I isolated the center rail as you would expect to separate the two loops, but was surprised that I had to isolate the two outside rails as well.