Tag: DCC

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Block Occupancy Detection Experiments, part 1

It’s been slow past few days – I squandered some of my time-off doing nothing, or driving around getting things, or just having hard time focusing. Maybe I should not be feeling guilty about it, time-off is supposed to be time off things, all of them. Oh well, onto the trains now.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been experimenting with various methods of block occupancy detection. As I plan to have the entire railroad detectable (for automation purposes) and it’s a mid-size layout, there will be many, many (…many) blocks (probably a hundred or so across 3 decks). I built couple of circuits, namely the single transistor one based off of NCE BD20 and modified by Reinhard Müller, and another based on a similar Current Transformer detector but with a LM555, originally from Paisley, with modifications from Helmut Schäfer.

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PECO “Creating a Model Railway” Instruction DVD video

A two part video from a PECO Instruction DVD circa 2000, with good advice for anyone entering the hobby.

Dated by timeless information covering the whole process from scale selection, layout design, benchwork construction, laying trackwork, wiring, scenery as well as operating.

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