First let me say I am blown away by the technological advances we have seen in our hobby the last 20 years. Having said that, changes are happening so fast that it is starting to make my head spin. I made the decision when I began my current, and probably last layout, to utilize DCC. Having been a veteran of block wired layouts, I loved the concept and the simplicity of the wiring. I have never regretted that decision. But when it comes to the advanced functioning, my head starts to spin. It’s starting to seem a little like overkill to me. I’m someone who thinks it is way cool to be able to press a function button on my remote wireless throttle and trigger a steam whistle, diesel horn, or bell. Then I read about the advanced functions and my eyes just glaze over. It is much the same feeling I had when I retired from my job as a computer programmer in 2001. I had become a dinosaur in that field too. When I entered the field, it was all about mainframe programming, or Big Iron as it came to be known. At the time I retired, it was all about networking, distributive processing, and client-server applications although to this day I have never heard anyone give an intelligent description of what the latter meant. These were the areas the younger kids coming into the field were interested in and for good reason. That is were the future was. Fortunately for me, our core applications still ran on Big Iron and they needed the dinosaurs like me to keep them running.
I have come to the conclusion that I can enjoy the benefits of the basic DCC applications without ever getting my arms around the advanced functions. I’m happy to be able to just type in the loco address and turn up the throttle without ever having to flip block switches and to control the direction of the loco without worrying about the polarity. To me, that in itself is enough reason to justify the change to DCC from block controlled systems. Maybe someday I will actually get around to learning about the more ad
Join the club—I started to redo the wiring on my layout using DIN rails and terminal connectors for those DIN rails—they so far have been working on the layout—reason—suitcase connectors are becoming a pain in the tukous when it comes to redoing screwed up connections[|(] and you’re spending time crawling around banging the crown on shelves and decking.
All I can say about the mental headaches is that the brain is working muscles that we thought it did not have-------Learning curves—gotta love 'em[:-^]
Funny, when I started running my first DCC train, I felt like an 8-year-old kid.
Don’t feel bad, my Corbettosaurus friend. I’ve come to the conclusion that one of the significant problems with today’s computer systems is that almost nobody really understands them, even the young minds that built them. We’ve reached the point where many of our critical systems have gone beyond the capabilities of those who must maintain them.
It’s been a while, but I think I could still easily debug FORTRAN code if I had to.
Never learned FORTRAN, MisterBeasley. I learned COBOL, Assembler, and RPG in school and my first job in the field was at a PL/1 shop. I was told that PL/1 was a blend of FORTRAN and COBOL and I found it fairly easy to pick up. COBOL was still king for most of my working life. In my estimation, Assembler was like the Latin of computer languages. While it wasn’t widely used anymore even way back in the late 1970s when I got started in the field, knowing that language gave me insights into the internal workings that I don’t think the younger kids got who cut their teeth on third and fourth generation languages. The non-programmers who are reading this probably think we are speaking Latin.
That brings up the question, After all these advances, where will we go next. Think about it. Weve made DCC. Smoke. Moving cars. Turnout control from your controler. What more? I have been pondering this for weeks, and I was going to post it in my own post, but this seems good enough. Have any of you all even thought of scale holographic moving figures?. A series of projectors linked up by a computer that project figures that can board trains, enter a car and drive away, and walk around town. First, its going to come from open building backs, and then it will move to overhead projectors. What do you all think about that?
I’m a forty year old high school educated carpenter and some of this DCC stuff makes my head spin. I feel better now knowing that some of this stuff is hard for computer guys.
I’m a 73 year old retired aircraft maintenance tech/supervisor, and I have a couple of pieces of paper that declare me to be an Associate in Electronics and a Bachelor of Data Processing - and after comparing the DCC ‘stuff’ with what I have been doing with analog DC ever since Ed Ravenscroft wrote up his MZL system in MR thirtysomething years ago I decided that the devil I know is preferable to the devil I don’t know.
The one thing I absolutely DETEST is the Black Box principle - “Well, this and this inputs go here and there, and this is what comes out the other end. You don’t need to know how that happens…” Well, I’m sorry, but I WANT to know how - and why - that happens! This great-grandpa isn’t buying, “Daddy knows best.”
As for wear and tear on the cranium, that can be avoided by routing all wiring along the fascia line, and making all connections at clearly-labeled terminal strips or blocks that can be worked on while sitting in a comfortable chair. The only spider webs under my layout are futile structures put there by hopeful arachnids (most of whom are still there, dead of starvation and dessication.)
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - analog DC, MZL)
Dont feel bad about being a dinosaur, even Barney is a meat-eater !
Funny, I just posted a question on the DCC forum about whether Bachmann’s inexpensive EZ Command DCC was worth the $50-75 I can buy it for on Evilbay, and for ALL the same reasons you listed above, particularly the lack of complex track wiring and block controls. My layout will be very small, only 4x6 so a simple and inexpensive system makes alot of sense for me, I dont know how elaborate your planning on building. But I figure the ability to forget about all that electronic track wiring crap and let the guys at my LHS worry about adding any chips is worth it if I can just run trains and enjoy them, sheesh, guess I’m getting older too but onward and upward.
My start into this hobby was in 1963, when I was given a Marklin starter set. My little empire grew every year - little by little, but each addition caused the wiring effort to grow by the square! Operation in those days was about letting as many trains as possible run on the layout, with some “automatic” control through rail contacts and signals.
I re-entered the hobby some 10 years ago and discovered the benefits of DCC. I had always been dreaming of controlling the trains instead of controlling the routing of power to the tracks and here it was!
DCC has influenced my track plan design - it is now a lot less track, a much more prototypical operation, less wiring effort. Do I understand what is happening in that “black box”? Only the basics - I leave such knowledge to my son who is majoring in computer engineering science… [(-D]
Yeah, those young whippersnappers couldn’t tell an environment division from a procedure division if even if it was laid out in plain microcode sitting in a wire-wrapped bank of 74181’s… Nobody wants to design and build their own CPU’s or wind their own memory cores anymore. They just want the off-the-shelf RTR stuff… you know, pentiums, amd, xeons-- (shrug) what can you do? The hobby is dying out.
I don’t know about designing your own CPUs or something like that, but I can tell an environment division and a procedure division… and we also don’t forget the identification division either. I’m a 23 year old web developer/programmer currently in college. I’m working with COBOL this semester.
Even with the programming experience, when it comes to DCC, I still don’t want to read and try to understand these manuals talking about speed curves, CVs, etc. I like the MRR stuff to be as simple as possible.
If only the manufacturers would listen to us and have standard decoder setting done in such a way, that the locos operate decently without us fiddlin´ around with them cv`s
Keypunching cards??? Been there, done that. When I got my first job programming in January 1977, we were still punching our source code on cards and submitting them to operations to be compiled. If you were lucky, you got two runs a day. That meant spending lots of time desk checking. (I wonder if the younger programmers even know what that means). Fortunately, we got CRTs within the year running with VM. It opened up a whole new world. I spent four years in that shop, then the next decade as a consultant (aka rent-a-programmer). I returned to my original employer in 1991 as the programming supervisor and was amazed to learn we still had one job which ran with card input which meant the JCL was also on cards. I still remember assigning one of our hot shot programmers just out of school to modifying that JCL. First I had to show him where the keypunch machine was and then show him how to use it. I kidded him that he couldn’t call himself a real programmer until he had worked with keypunch cards. You wouldn’t believe the look I got from him. It was actually kind of fun but probably a good thing when we phased out that application a few years later.
The nice thing about a hobby is that you can choose the technologies you will use, and ignore the others. DC remains quite viable, and plenty of fun for its users. DCC, minus downloadable and complex sound, also does what it was intended to do.
The list of “pushed” technologies goes on. If you use plywood and Homasote instead of foam and latex caulk, you’ve already placed yourself in the prehistoric era. God forbid, is there anybody else out there still using plaster over screen wire?
Something to be kept in mind is that the forums tend to be full of threads about issues with the latest and greatest. There are very few posts about mundane successes with proven techniques and technologies. And those of us who happily and deliberately stick with our dinosaur ways learn to keep our heads down and our mouths shut. There’s no convincing a recent DCC convert that perhaps X blocks and a $20 handheld throttle might have made his DC experience better. Or try to convince a “foamer” that hard shell screen and zip texturing still work. In fact, to justify their investment and choices, a few will misrepresent dinosaur technologies in a negative way to the others, based on what they have heard, not their actual experiences. At the same time, watch how quickly a thread on making your own DC handheld throttle or finding the materials for zip texturing disappears into the archives. On the MR forums in particular, there is little interest in anything not being pushed in the pages of MR as current state of the hobby. But enough whining - the forum is what it is.
If you socialize with other model railroaders outside of this particular forum, you will soon find each forum and social venue has its own flavor and personality. I am personally surprised as to how closely this forum follows the Model Railroader line - but maybe I shouldn’t be. More than a few of the topics brought up besides the usual beginner quest
