I have a a Digitrax Zephyr Command station DCC system with a Digitrax DB200+ 8 amp booster with no command statioin. I want to divide my layout into power districts so if there’s a short circuit in my layout, it won’t affect it all. What is the best method of creating power districts, and what equipment will I need?
You don’t need any boosters. Just add a sub-bus between your main bus and the myriads of feeders. Then you will have two wires that come off your main bus in each gapped “district” and those wires will feed/branch into your sub-bus for each “district”. Into one of those wires, in series, wire a 12 volt 2.4 amp taillight bulb, automotive type. I can never remember the number, but I think its 1136 or maybe its 1139…someone will jump on me and correct me. So, lets say you divide your layout into four “districts”, but you power each with its own sub-bus and feeders off each sub-bus. Your 8 amp system is plenty for your purposes, I assume. When you get your short on any one of these segregated “districts”, the applicable light bulb will glow and take all the amperage it needs to keep the power in control, thus saving your decoders. In the meantime, your base station will think to itself, wow, that is one heavy draw for a single decoder, but…oh, well…I’ll just keep on going. That is precisely what the taillight bulbs are meant to do. Joe Fugate teaches us this trick, so credit goes to him.
BTW, I use this setup myself, and can aver that it works…very nicely, thanks.
I believe it’s an 1156 bulb. [:D]
Rotor
There are a lot of good articles and books on DCC and specifically power districts - Kalmbach has a couple of good ones, Tony’s Trains (www.tonystrains.com) is a good resource and Joe Fugate has many posts on here as well as his website. I’ve found in my rookie research over the last couple of years that you should really research the need for power boosters - unless you’re running a lot of locos you probably don’t need one but the people who sell boosters won’t tell you that.