My son has come to me with an idea and one that I like. He is now 28 yrs old and we had a layout in our basement back in 1982 until 1988 and it was a pretty big one, but for personal reasons it had to come down. I saved all the rolling stock and then one day he came over and ask me if I ever thought of doing another railroad?
Well I didn’t have to be asked twice we went to basement and measured where the layout would start and end. It would be 2’ 10" wide and 15’ 6" long, no grades, no mountains, just switching and and an oval run, a simpler, quiet RR, if that is at all possiable. My son has informed that he will play the Doom Sayer when the model RR fever hits me and want to expand it to the far reaches of my galaxy, which would be into the wife’s sewing room.
My question here is this, when I gave up my first layout, DCC was just coming into it’s own and now I see that it is here and from what I can see it’s working well for most of you. Where should I start? Who, what, where and when I guess is what I am asking?
When I first joined the local HO scale club, DCC was in its infancy and decoders still cost nearly $75 each. Some members were touting CTC-16 as a better choice than DCC. Everyone was running on block control using six MRC power packs. As the layout was expanded, we wound up having to use more than 10 MRC power packs.
Eventually, the CTC-16 proponents quit the club or faded into the woodwork when it was realized that it was no better than straight DC block control and would cost more in the long run than DCC.
We installed DCC in 1995 with a home-made system that used an Atari 130XE computer as the command station. Today we are using the North Coast Engineering PowerPro Radio system.
Even though the layout today can still be operated using either DC block control or DCC, hardly anyone still uses DC block control except to test run a newly acquired locomotive before asking me to install a decoder.
If we were building the club layout today from scratch and wiring for only DCC operation, the wiring would be so simplified that we could have saved close to $1,000 on toggle switches, wire, and control panels.
Welcome aboard. Love your screen name. I was born in Brooklyn, long, long time ago.
I, too, saved all my rolling stock, track, engines and structures when I packed up my layout over 40 years ago. And, when I came back 4 years ago, I found the Brave New World of DCC. I’ve heartily embraced DCC. The age of my engines made most of them non-serviceable, even in DC, so I’ve bought almost entirely new ones. I have saved a few shells and installed a decoder in the one old engine that still ran, but mostly my fleet is new.
The old track, of the brass variety, is now a collectors item. In our neighborhood, if we put it out by the curb on Wednesday morning, they will come along and collect it. Yeah, it really is almost that good. I’ve used a few pieces to make guard rails and bridge track, but I wouldn’t run trains on it.
I run subways under my layout, by the way. I still love them, after all these years. One way to get more out of your space is to go vertical, and that’s what I chose to do.
For my final suggestion, consider a car float as part of your layout. That’s a ferry barge for railroad cars. Although designed as a static model, it can be used as a “train casette,” and removed from the layout to replace one set of cars with another. Loading and unloading car floats provide a very switching-intensive activity for a model railroad.
Well thank you MisterBeasley for the comment and you were born in Brooklyn you say? Once a Brooklynnite always a Brooklynite. I currently work for the NYCTA as a Motorman. I work on the D line from Stilwell Ave to 205 Street in the Bronx. What line do you have running under your layout?
my personal recommendation would be to go to your local hobby shop and ask a clerk about the different types of dcc systems out there. he should give you plenty of information. Another way you could find out about dcc systems is to find the websites of different dealers and look at the source.