Marklin 8559 diamond crossing

Hello, I'm new to Z guage and have a bit of a problem with the Marklin 8559 diamond crossing. Have searched the "beginners" section of the forum, but not found an answer to this one...

I have included it with two left turnouts as part of a double diamond junction on my layout. My problem is that it doesn't seem to be an isolating piece of track, and on further inspection certainly looks like it isn't! Is this true? I perhaps wrongly assumed that a diamond crossover would always isolate between the two tracks...

As my layout doesn't use DCC, having both up and down tracks sharing the same current is obviously going to cause me issues.

Has anyone else encountered something like this? And if so, how did they cope with it? I have a bit of an idea of completely isolating it from both up and down tracks and then using some kind of switch to switch between them, but this is obviously more overhead and not ideal at all....

Last resort would be to whip it out completely and use a single lead junction instead - but again, not what I want to do...

The biggest mistake, was after testing the running of a few trains over the junction to check for derailment, I soldered it in place!! It's only when unexpected trains started moving later on I realised the problem...

Hi,
Welcome to Z scale. I'm afraid there is not much good news regarding your issue. Unfortunately, you're right: the diamond crossing, turnouts and double slip turnout are not isolated or power routing. And this holds true for just about all available Z track from the various manufacturers. The expectation is that one would use the isolating rail joiners available in the Marklin 8954 to isolate the crossing and use a semaphore or relay box to route the power.
If you're good with a Dremel tool, you should be able to cut the track to isolate it, but as you've alrady mentioned, you would need a switch or relay to route power.

Mark

We had the same topic just 2 days ago in our German forum. The older version of this crossing has isolated tracks. You can see it on the link to an old ebay-auction, the left crossing is the old one.
cgi.ebay.de/MARKLIN-2x-KREUZUNG-8559-SPUR-Z-2KWAY141-/280667060022
Mattias

Thanks for the responses. Given that I wouldn't sleep soundly again knowing there are isolating crossings out there, I think I'm gonna have to go down the eBay route to get hold of one and replace the existing one with it....

Cheers
Iain

Right now Eurohobbies shows two crossovers. One is all metal, the other looks like it is insulated. Here is the link. www.eurorailhobbies.com/erh_detail.asp?erh_find=crossing&stock=T14973
I have the metal one and ordered one of the other type. I hope it is insulated as I have the same problem.

I don't think this is Z scale. The Trix name is generally associated with HO and if it were Z scale it would be a 13-degree crossing not a 15-degree.

Mark