I literally grew up with electric trains of all kinds. Plus, we used to build simple electric circuits in our junior high science classes, so I had a pretty good idea of how most simple electrical devices worked. Now several contacts from readers remind me that today's middle school students are studying. We will be using two terms that describe ways of "measuring" the electricity, or of measuring a circuit's ability to carry electricity. 1. Voltagemeasures the. We use 120-volt power in our walls because the voltage is high enough to drive current throughout the house, and low enough to be safe as long as the wires. The electronic symbol for a diode is shown to the right. The arrow shape indicates that electricity coming that direction will get through the device. The vertical bar indicates that electricity coming from that direction will NOT get through the device. If you put just one of these into a circuit, it would allow every other phase of the AC current. By now you've probably figured out that if your train is going a certain direction, and you pick it up and turn it around without changing the direction of the voltage, the train will continue to go the same direction, only backwards. That's because the direction of the current, not the direction of the locomotive, controls which way the train goes.