bachman dcc controller

[Martijn Meerts]

Nah, you hook up the same Zephyr to both lines.

 

The thing to remember is that with DCC you're not controlling the current on the track. There will ALWAYS be 12-24 Volt (depending on the command station and settings) on the track. You could have a simple oval, and control as many trains on there as will fit/the command station can handle.

[The_Ghan]

question for you then. I have read the manual on the zephyr plus, and it looks as though i can only have it running on 1 line plus the programming track.

 

I have 2 lines so i would need to get a second zephyr and connect via the loco net a/b plugs to run trains on both lines?

 

 

Keitaro,

 

You're probably referring to the diagrams on page 23.  Just put a PM42 where it says "Power District".  The PM42 can handle four power districts.  As long as the total load doesn't exceed that of the Zephyr you won't have a problem.  You then split the wires to radiate to various points on all your tracks like a cartwheel.  Remember, you are applying the same AC current to all track and sending signals to decoders. 

 

Cheers

 

The_Ghan

[KenS]

Well, let's not over-complicate things.  Circuit breakers like the PM42 are wonderful things; I use them.  But they're overkill for a small beginner's layout. There's a perfectly good circuit breaker in the Zephyr. Unless you have very long wires from command station to track, or want to subdivide the track so a short in one place doesn't shut down the whole system, you don't need an add-on circuit breaker. The one reason you might use a circuit breaker on a small layout would be to set the trip point really low (1.5 Amps on a PM42) to minimize the risk from a short.  But the Zephyr or other small command station isn't as much of a risk as a full-size command station designed for club layouts.

 

Keitaro, you can split the single output from the Zephyr to connect to more than one feeder.  With Unitrack, the easiest method would just be to cut the power pack end off the wires, strip the insulation off about 5-8mm of wire, and twist blue to blue and white to white, and stick those into the Rail A/Rail B terminals on the Zephyr. That should work for two or three feeders. With more, you need something like a barrier strip that allows connecting multiple wires together with screw terminals.

 

The important part is to make sure a blue wire connects only to rail that leads into another rail touched by blue wire, and never white.  In a simple oval that's trivial.  It gets harder as the track gets more complex.  If you use Kato's double crossover and get it wrong, things will work fine until a train tries to cross because it has built-in insulators, then the wheel or internal wiring of the car or loco will short across the insulator in the track.  If you're lucky the circuit breaker in the Zephyr will trip fast enough to avoid damage to the train.  If not, things could melt or be welded to the track.  I have a cheap loco I use for testing newly-wired track so I don't fry a $300 model by accident, although I've never had a serious short. It really takes a set of circumstances you shouldn't normally encounter on a small layout to cause that kind of problem, although it can happen.

 

Shorts are pretty normal. You'll get them if you run wrong-way into a turnout set for the other direction (I seem to do that a lot).  That's why they build circuit breakers into the command stations.  But they're still something to avoid when you can. It helps that the Zephyr is only a 3 Amp system, and not the 5 Amps found on larger systems.

 

If you need more than the 3 Amps put out by the Zephyr (that's about 15-30 modern N-scale trains) you can use loconet to hook up a booster to the Zephyr to power some sections of track separately from the track powered by the Zephyr, but you'd have to have a really large layout to have that problem.  You'll likely hit the 22-train limit of the Zephyr Xtra (or the 10 train limit of the original Zephyr) first and need a new command station.

[The_Ghan]

Yuh,

 

And that 22 trains is "trains running on the track", so you can own hundreds, all fitted with decoders with separate addresses, but you can only run 22 of them at once.  Actually, 3A is probably not enough for 22 trains, especially since keitaro has done a lot with internal lighting etc.

 

There's a separate thread somewhere about how much current is used by internal lighting.

 

Cheers

 

The_Ghan

[KenS]

Good point.  My Kato Tokyo Metro (10 cars, with DCC and Kato V2 LED Lighting) draws about 200mA in motion, and a bit more at start or climbing a grade.  That's about 15 trains on a Zephyr, and less in practice because some of that "3 Amps" needs to be for peak needs.  Of course without lighting the train only uses about 50mA, which means you could power close to 60 unlit trains if the Zephyr didn't have a limit of 22. Trains lit with bulbs will be more (likely around 650mA for a similar train, bulbs run around 60mA each), which might only allow four trains on a Zephyr.  And sound-equipped trains have high demand, but at least today those aren't common.

 

We had a discussion of lighting recently on a thread about the Kato kits:

 

http://www.jnsforum.com/index.php/topic,6306.0.html

 

as well this one about the Kato Ginza train:

 

http://www.jnsforum.com/index.php/topic,5642.0.html

 

There have been a number of others, but no consolidated summary.  Hmm, which gives me an idea...time to go start a new topic.

and an older discussion on adding lighting to other trains:

 

http://www.jnsforum.com/index.php/topic,1585.0.html

[The_Ghan]

KenS

 

Your first post in the new lighting thread is excellent and the whole idea of a sticky being used as a repository of knowledge is something that needs to be expanded here.

 

Cheers

 

The_Ghan

[Guest Closed Account 1]

Keitaro:

 

Digitrax isn't the only DCC brand to use.

 

I'd skip the hand controller and use your iPhone with a JMRI system.