Large Scale Central

Beginner builds a railway

Track and Trestles
#21
Warren Mumpower said:
John, I agree with everyone else.. It looks great!

There is one suggestion I would make. When you do the inside loop place some cloth weed block between the ground and ballast. I’m afraid you may have to mow the right of way on the outside loop. You may be thinking of using round-up to control weeds. Just be careful around the tree and the back bushes. It would be easy to kill those. :frowning:


Warren
Thank you for your kind comment and suggestion. Unfortunately the inner loop is already down. Before any tracks were laid I did put down a landscapers cloth but subsequently had to add more dirt to level. I now probably have too much soil on top of the cloth. I will use round-up and at your suggestion will be careful about the bushes and tree.
Thanks

#22

Thanks to all who have commented and made suggestions. After I completed the outer loop it was time to put power on the tracks. Some suggested that you should run a bus and attach feeders every few feet, preferably soldered. I really did not want to do solder so I decided on attaching via rail clamps. Also instead of using feeders I decided to use #10 wire and run two direct connections from each loop back to the boosters. Each loop is about 200 feet so that meant about 100 feet between connections. I then ran several sets of #10 wire from a point near the connections up the line so that the distance between connections would not be more than about 30 feet. I had no idea if this would work or not. The wires were color coded for each rail and I placed different colored tape on each pair so I could keep the loops separate. Where the points connect the loops I placed spacers in the rails. WIRE BURIED

COLOR CODED

#23

I had decided early on that I wanted to run DCC. I know that there is a large difference of opinion on this subject but I felt it was best for me. The problem was that there is no definative answer to which DCC system is best or easiest to use. I asked questions on this forum and others, read the literature and asked my club members. Surprisingly there was little information from the forums and none from my fellow club members. Based on what little I had to go on I decided to go with EasyDCC from CVP Products. I would run two of their 10 amp boosters (one for each loop) powered by a 10amp 18VAC power source on each. Their control panel has two throttles and I initially purchased two wireless throttles. An amazing thing happened. Out of the box it worked!!! Initially I tried it on 2 locos that had MTS II decoders and one that had a Lenz decoder. The voltage around the track was constant and the engines ran fine even at the far end of the loop. CONTROLS FOR EASY DCC

#24

These are the locos during test run. TEST RUN

#25

Encouraged by my success I completed the second loop and applied the power from the second booster. That loop also worked well. Up to that point I did not attempt any programming with the DCC, just ran the locos. SECOND LOOP

LOCOS

#26

Congratulations, it looks great, and the feeling of running a successful train is beyond compare.

#27

YES! That is looking good!

BTW John, please keep us posted on the Easy-DCC setup, I’m especially interested in the radio cabs.

#28
Hans-Joerg Mueller said:
YES! That is looking good!

BTW John, please keep us posted on the Easy-DCC setup, I’m especially interested in the radio cabs.


I know a little about electric but almost nothing about electronics. The manual that came with Easy DCC is about 200 pages but very easy to understand. It is writen in simple language with very good step by step instructions.
So far I was able to easily reprogram the acceleration and deceleration steps. The two Moguls with Lenz decoders at first ran slowly. I was able to go into the program and change a single bit in CV 50 that corrected the problem.
The wireless throttles are model T9000E which I believe they also sell as part of their Airwire system for battery operated engines. The wireless base station is in my shed which is at one end of the layout. The other end of the layout is 80 feet away and the throttles seem to work no matter where you are standing. The throttles are easy to program, you can switch from one loco to another with a few clicks.
While at the York train show I saw the operator at the Lenz booth operating an engine using the CVP throttle.

#29

Wow, you’ve really made a lot of good progess! Congrats!

#30

So what is being said here? Can any transmitter control any decoder under DCC? I don’t believe I’ve ever seen that stated before.

#31

Fantastic job so far. I also started my first railroad this past spring with pretty good sucess. It’s a ton of work however you know the feeling when your first train runs! Thanks for sharing!
Dave

#32
Ric Golding said:
So what is being said here? Can any transmitter control any decoder under DCC? I don't believe I've ever seen that stated before.
Any DCC transmitter and any DCC decoder will work together. I use Prodigy Advance DCC on my n scale layout, but I use a combination of different decoders in my locos. Everything from the stock Atlas, to Lenz, to Digitrax. They all work together.
#33

No kidding. In all the years of listening to that stuff, I have never heard that scenario. So are you saying that an Airwire system could be used with a Digitrax controller, if they were both trackpowered or both wireless?

#34
Ric Golding said:
No kidding. In all the years of listening to that stuff, I have never heard that scenario. So are you saying that an Airwire system could be used with a Digitrax controller, if they were both trackpowered or both wireless?
Ric,

That’s the fly in the ointment, unless they both use the same protocol on the bus they won’t be able to communicate. I have been waiting the last 3 years for ZIMO to finally get a NA-licenced R/C controller on the market. But I’m a patient guy, it will show up “one day soon”; in the meantime I envy the Euro crowd who had theirs for about four years with a gazillion of improvements every step of the way. Grrrrr!

Architecture and protocol is what separates the wheat from the chaff, not as critical in LS - unless you run many engines all at the same time and want auto control of everything - but it sure shows up on large club layouts in the smaller scales. Get enough equipment talking back and forth and the weak spots show up in a hurry. Precisely the reason why ZIMO decided on the industrial CAN-bus.

PS I don’t believe that the CVP can talk to Digitrax, but it can talk to Atlas, Lenz, NCE and SystemOne.

#35

Too many years out of HO and entirely too happy with r/c and batteries to really care. It still sounds like the same old Ford or Chevy argument. Everybody has great ideas and can’t understand why other people don’t just agree with them. :wink: Thanks for the answers. Thought something new was going to be learned. Same game, different players.

#36

Interesting…

On another forum it was claimed that DCC was a universal standard. So, I thought everything could talk to everything.

Oh well. It’s nice that we have so many standards to choose from… :wink:

#37
Bruce Chandler said:
Interesting...

On another forum it was claimed that DCC was a universal standard. So, I thought everything could talk to everything.

Oh well. It’s nice that we have so many standards to choose from… :wink:


Bruce et al,

The NMRA-DCC Standard covers the most basic stuff. As always the devil is in the details i.e. how the different mfgs implement different aspects of what one needs to run things. And there we are back to “you get what you pay for” :wink: :), no magic bullets that will work with all of the other magic bullets in sight. But the compatability at the decoder level is good, on that other forum they were probably talking about decoders and how they should plug in.
This may be a dumb analogy but decoders are like spark plugs, there are many different makes of those, too. All they do is fire. :slight_smile:

OTOH if you read the manuals carefully, ask a lot of questions and are patient, chances are you end up with the system that is perfect for your purposes and it will grow with the technology. But there are no guarantees!! It’s like the rest of life: “NO GUARANTEES” :lol: :lol:

#38

I guess my using DCC on the new railway raised a lot of questions. That is good because there is so little good information about this method of running trains. For Hans-Joerg: CVP claims their command station can talk to any decoder and in point of fact I am running a Mogul with a Digitrax decoder. Back to my railroad progress: I replaced the temporary trestle with a permanent one. I wish I could say I scratchbuilt it but I did not. I purchased 3 bridges and several sections of trestle and cribbing from various sources on Ebay and from magazine ads. Then I assembled together. PERMANENT TRESTLE

#39

This is a view of the cribbing.

#40

You know it humorous that I have never heard that all DCC controllers will work with any other DCC boards in any engine. I never even caught that was the premise. I always thought the idea was to have a plug that would allow them all to plug into the same wiring harness in an engine. I guess thay all want to sell you there product because it is the BEST. Whatever, not my part of the hobby.