DCC and DC

The age at which kids master anything with pushbuttons gets lower and lower. My youungest grandaughter - 7 months old - was left playing on the floor in front of the TV. Somehow she managed to get hold of the remote control and was happily channel hopping until her mother noticed what was going on. A swift confiscation of the remote brought forth howls of protest, so she was given an old remote. Grandaughter was most perplexed when nothing changed when she pushed the buttons.

Keith Norgrove wrote:

snip

The issue is that there are many people who are interested in model railway operation, but who dont want to have to be a qualified electrical engineer in order to wire up any layout more advanced than a "platform, loop and 2 sidings" branch line terminus.

Hey, nobody ever reasonably accuses me or my layout electronics of simplicity. The two most common questions I get from enthusiast viewer are: "what are all those wires under your layout for?" and "How the hell does this layout know what I want to do before I know?"

Regards, Greg.P.

You miss my point. Gregory was extolling the virtue of club members not having to learn the complexities of operation, not construction. To my mind clubs ought to be about correct operation, Switch the turnout, pull off the signal and run the train. DCC lets you ignore the signals and any interlocking.

Ken.

How is this anything to do with DCC? Go to any exhibition and you will see numerous examples of DC layouts where signals and interlocking are ignored. This is a matter of attitude not technology. Keith Make friends in the hobby. Visit Garratt photos for the big steam lovers.

And DC wouldnt? I remember as a kid with my hornby train set running trains through signals which were still at caution and against points. It is up to the driver of the trains to OBEY the signals - regardless of whether the means of power is clockwork, DC, Steam, Diesel or DCC. It also doesnt matter if the guage is 16.5mm or 4' 8.5".

DCC is attractive, if it were built-in by the manufacturer and cheap I would probably use it. For anyone starting out in the hobby cost and reliability are the prime considerations (with space being a major constraint on ambition). The only potential plus to DCC that I can see would be the addition of an on-board battery to cover for dirty sections of track. For kids adding wipers to the loco to provide additional pick ups is a big help, kids dont mind the lack of realism but like the improved reliability

Over the last few years I have built a number of small layouts for various kids who wanted to try the hobby out. As I have some N Gauge stuff of my own these have all been in N, the smallest (to date) was

20 inches by 48 inches. This required or allowed two locomotives to be on the layout at any one time, to get round problems of dirty point blades the individual tracks were all wired in and a bank of cheap switches added for power. It had a small fan of sidings, a station with loop, a goods yard with three sidings and two industrial sidings.The 'rest of the world' was a section of twin track forming a passing loop under a hill in the rear right corner on which one train could be parked whilst the other went belting round the basic oval. DCC would help with the dirty point blade problem but at a considerably greater cost.

This layout cost about £100 to make using a lot of second hand track etc, and the three locos I gave the lad to work with had a probable value of about £120.

Given the constraints of cost it is unlikely that the lad would have more than a couple of locomotives or a layout more complex than that described above for the first couple of years in the hobby.

DCC would offer minimal advantages on such a layout and would add to the cost, probably doubling it or there abouts. The locomotives constitute only a relatively small part of a layout, I dont fancy winding my own motors much and even get nervous building a loco kit, so I tend to put more effort into other areas. I find a lot of fun in solving silly problems (working container cranes, revolving sections of platform so passengers come and go, that kind of thing)

Frankly I had a lot of fun with the thing, just playing trains really, but I got a ,lot of pleasure from making the buildings and general scenic detailing. I am likely to move home in the near future and I will probably build something essentially similar but a bit bigger (probably on a flat panel door, 6'6" by 2'6") . If I had space and spare cash I would like to go for DCC in O Gauge, although the layout as described would do all I wanted of it.

Hence I think that the main issue is cost, if DCC were as cheap as DC and provided built-in to the locomotives a lot of people would be using it.

Not all however. I am building a locomotive out of cardboard for an old timplate layout, although it has to be battery powered as I couldn't find a suitable clockwork motor. This is still the same hobby, broadly speaking, but DCC wouldn't fit into that end of it at all. If my cardboard loco gets trashed it will only cost a fiver to replace, but I thinlk it will provide as much 'fun' as the latest continental DCC, sound-equipped, super detailed, fine flanged locomotives (over which I do drool occasionally)

Regards

Mike.

In message , snipped-for-privacy@notigg.not.no writes

For cheap O gauge 'tinplate' type motors, try the American eBay site. Lionel and Marx 0-4-0 units are cheap, the Lionel electric being 18v DC, Marx 14v DC, and there are also clockwork Marx units. Certainly no more than 5 dollars each. Marx battery powered units are often available, too.

Thanks for the tip!

I can make track from umberella ribs on ply sleepers but I was a bit concerned about points - I'd forgotten the Lionel stuff (played with a friends layout in the USA, well impressed) With a bit of luck I'kk pick a few up (I need four I think for a loop and two sidings)

Regards

... but see my further comments to Mike, regarding Marx electric motors.

In message , snipped-for-privacy@notigg.not.no writes

One word of warning. Marx electric mechs have the final drive cog cast as part of the two driving wheels on one side, which is fine, except that on *some* motors the diameter of the cog is the same as the wheel, which makes the use of any but Marx points/turnouts all but impossible, because the wheel is so thick.

Good grief!

I love cheapo Lionel and Marx 027 points. Cheap, cheerful, reliable and easy to fix when necessary. Marx points are universal - whilst not all their motors will run through other makes of turnout, I've never had trouble running anything (Lionel, Hornby, Bing etc.) through Marx points.

I am NOT knocking DCC, I'm questioning the simplicity argument on club layouts. OK I should perhaps have written DCC/DC, but the argument is still the same.

Ken.

The interesting thing is some of these RTR models fitted with DCC decoders have sound fitted as well and run on DC. This means you get most of the bells and whistles without going to DCC.

There should be no great difficulty for an electronics designer to create a locomotive module for analogue with almost all the features of DCC; starting and maximum speeds, speed mapping, feedback control, constant lighting, functions, switch-in/switch-out etc. The differences to some of the currently available decoders would only be in programming.

Programming the address and operating the functions would require the relevant DCC commands to be injected into the analogue track current, but that would only require a simple command unit.

Regards, Greg.P.

In message , Terry Flynn writes

You don't get the full range of sound effects and you have to buy an additional module to go in your track feed if you don't want to be mucking around with your controls, but you're essentially correct

Most of the above is already available. See how it is done at

click on the sound button. You use your reverse switch to activate 2 functions, for example the locomotive whistle. Constant lighting is available as a couple of volts is required for sound to work, and the starting voltage is above this value.

Absolutely, I was in no way saying it was better than model railways in that respect, what we have is just an online virtual model railway club, those who have PC's and the simulator can take part from their homes, have a play in their own time with the routes and so forth.

It's just another way of doing it, that's all :)

We visit a huge number of Model Railway exhibitions including Brighton Model World, Warley NEC and Doncaster FoBMR as well as lots of other smaller exhibitions all over the country (literally, next one is Hawick in Scotland, and we're way down south!) - not because we want to take over from Model Railways but because a great number of our users are in to the model railway scene and by extension a lot of our new users come from it (or add us to their interests perhaps is a better way of putting it :) ) - we get massively good feedback at these exhibitions too with only a couple of people grumbling that we're destroying their hobby though even those occurences have all but disappeared now too.

My own local model railway club is only really interested in European HO from what I can gather, i'm definitely in to the British scene. Still, my dad has an enormous OO gauge layout that he's building

- look for the link to Onehouse Model Railway) so I try to help out there in whatever small way I can :)

Matt.

With the best will in the world, I cannot for a minute accept that railway modelling and "virtual modelling" are closely linked. At best, train simulations are just sophisticated computer games. All you are doing with them is pushing pixels around a screen...