New Railway Modellers Forums

A good source of thin wire for lighting etc - old USB printer cables. Red, black, green and white colour coding and all come in 1mtr lengths.

I always used alarm cable or even telephone cable, cheap enough and comes in 100mtr lengths

Alarm cable might be just about ok on small DC layouts but you need something more substantial for DCC. I don't want to sound like a Jonah but telephone cable is very thin and a solid conductor, that's too thin and too fragile for carrying power of any kind to the track, it is however very good in bundles twisted together for making the trunks and branches of trees. USB leads, telephone and earpiece cords frequently have nylon thread mixed in with the copper fibres, or are formed from a conductive layer on the outside of silk or nylon thread, to give them maximum flexibility, which makes them just about impossible to connect properly to screw, crimp or solder connectors of any kind.

I tend to avoid any single core cable for wiring, which I believe the telephone cable is.

Telephone cable is single, not flexible, but alarm cable is multi strand and flexible

Campaigner wrote:Telephone cable is single, not flexible, but alarm cable is multi strand and flexible

When you are perched on the top of a seven foot ladder with your head and arms through the hole left by removing one ceiling tile, identification by checking the relative flexibility is not a particularly useful test. First shut down the alarm panel then performing the "cutters diagonal No.2" test was fairly reliable, even if it did mean reconnecting the alarm cable when your first guess was wrong!