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I'm actually not a DCC user, but I've been asking on these boards and reading up on documentation for a little while now preparation for a conversion to DCC and integration with a PC for control and perhaps automation. Like you, PCs are my career and model railroad my hobby, although I'm sadly far from retirement. <br />From what I can tell, the simplest course would probably be to pick up the Digitrax Zephyr and a LocoBuffer II. That allows a PC, via serial port, to talk to the LocoNet. The software most often discussed seems to be JMRI, the Java Model Railroad Interface, which is cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Mac...anything that'll do java, really). It includes a decoder programmer and a package called panelpro for doing switch control. I think there's also an automation component, but I haven't looked at it extensively. <br />If you want to do full automation, you'll probably want to do block detection and transpoding so you can figure out where the trains actually *are*. Both are described on the Digitrax website and I'm sure you could get advice here too. To do block detection you'll need to break your layout into power districts and blocks...if you have a diagram of your layout you could post that'd be help.
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