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Yup, You guessed it another DCC question
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Cary, <br /> <br />If you plan on storing trains on sidings or in staging , you might want to isolate those tracks so that you can cut power to the decoders not in use. While this isn't necessary using DCC, it is nice to not have decoders (that are not in active use) subjected to power surges from shorts. It also cuts down on the possibility of adding to the in rush of current that the booster sees after a short as all the capacitors charge up (speaking mainly sound here). This can be enough to cause problems if you were to have a bunch of BLI sound locos in storage (we should all be so lucky to have this problem). <br /> <br />You could isolate bunches of tracks with one buss. Because locos don't move in DCC unless spoken to, you don't have to cut off all of the tracks individually. When you want to move a train out of storage, you can turn on all the tracks, move the train and kill the power again. This will still have the effect of keeping the decoders not in use powered down without having the hassle of wiring each track to a different block. I did this in my helix staging. Works pretty well.
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