A giant leap for DC ?

In message , Dragon Heart writes

Could that be sound for DC? They've had that in the USA and Canada for some considerable time now.

There's absolutely no reason why analogue, particularly PWM analogue can't carry DCC signals or have DCC signals imposed upon it. A sound or accessory decoder only needs two consecutive commands to operate any feature until a further command turns it off again.

Regards, Greg.P.

These are regular DCC sound decoders that automatically switch to DC. They come with controllers that activate a few of the sound effects when the loco is run on DC.

HTH

Sound over analogue is very old stuff. The late Bert Groves(*) had sound from inside coaches in his garden N gauge layout from about 1970 onwards. And, yes, it was a full-time garden railway which survived about 20 years.

(* I've been writing an article which describes how he influenced model makers of today. )

- Nigel

would go for wireless control.

Cheers, Simon

Garden N gauge ? How well did that work and in what kind of climate ? Given the amount of general cleaning and so on needed for N gauge in an ordinary living room I would have thought running it outside would be quite a challenge.

I wish it would be - radio control with 12v through the track would be nice. Current offerings assume battery operation and are very expensive, their brochures not making it clear as to what exactly you are getting into. Plus there are a limited number of channels (which could be overcome with multiplexing I suppose).

I'd welcome a good, basic, inexpensive system.

Cheers Richard

At the present time the construction of sound units which perform according to the control volts on each section is not very demanding. They have been around since the 70's when transistors first showed up. Equally lighting is almost not voltage dependent with the use of LED's and keep alive low voltage AC. There is no reason why radio control should not be employed as in other model disciplines especially the digital version which enables a limitless number of gates to be employed.

The drawback ( if it is so) is that it becomes a very time consuming task - almost to the exclusion of everything else!

The sole advantage of DCC is independent speed control in the same section.

Regards

"Dragon Heart" wrote

Stallholder? Swapmeet or model railway show? Most rumours start at the former.

Gosh a manufacturer trusting a 'sworn to secrecy' stallholder, now there's confidence for you.

On a more serious note, there's no reason why someone shouldn't be considering developing a whole new analogue control concept for model railways.

There must be some specialised manufacturers of traditional analogue control equipment who are feeling the pinch following declining sales and may have had to 'buy in' their own DCC systems. Consequently they are possibly having to accept lower profit margins as they do not manufacture these themselves.

It would certainly make some sort of sense for companies of this ilk to be looking for something they can churn out themselves very cheaply, and certainly if such a system precluded the need for DCC decoders then they might well be onto a winner.

John.

Southern UK, Surrey I think. Being Bert Groves, it would have worked properly, but I never saw it.

Consult archives and its all described, eg, Railway Modeller 1967. He had track cleaning stock and a track oiler which was run before and after every session to help keep things working properly.

- Nigel

I remember seeing another article about N gauge in the garden back in 1996 or so, but unfortunately I don't have acess to my old magazines and cannot remmebr the title. The author said that he used a HF track cleaner to keep slugs adn snails off the line, but had trouble with cats and rabbits.

How about one of those rocket launchers they have for PC USB ports ?

Chris