I did a search on the subject and was buried under DCC articles, so I’ll just ask outright. I am due for some power pack upgrades, what I have isn’t cutting it. A small toylike thing with a poor quality throttle control came with my son’s trainset, and I have an old TYCO dual cab unit with one cab still functional, and currently, the DC and AC terminal’s status unknown.
The control panel for the layout is designed with two wings, each of which can fit a single or dual cab controller up to 6 inches wide. I’m using a mix of diesels and steam, recent and up to 35 year old locomotives, and the layout includes a steep grade of 4.3 percent.
The toy transformer that came with the train set has power to spare for all the locos to pull the grade, but the electronics are so poor that it only has two effective speeds, too slow and too fast. The Tyco has less total power, won’t run the locos as fast, but the control is delicate and I like the power curve, it’s easy to do realistic starts and stops.
The layout is a folded dogbone with a dual mainline connecting the two loops, with two multi-track spurs inside the upper loop and near the U turn dual line curve. It is wired into six control blocks, one for each turn around loop, one for the inner and outer hillclimb U curve, and one block for each spur area.
I can see up to three separate operations going on at once, mainline runs, switching at the upper mining spurs, and switching and train make-up on the lower set of spurs in town, which is also an interchange with another railroad depicted by the lower turn-around loop. The lower loop also has two spurs for staging, but those will be controlled with DPDT switches and the cab for the loop itself. The plan is to haul loads of ore out of twon, park them on the loop under the mountain for a while in “Durango”, while staged freights and passengers bring up coal, freight, and passengers to town. These are then broken down and the necessary cars sent on up to the mines.