I just got a easy dcc command Starter Systems with zone mater SZB7 and zone share ZS .And my layout is a 4x8 with one main line with one rip track and 4 tracks for a yard what size or lenth how many feet on the track can be on a zone or block
The zone can be any length you want it to be. Our club has the entire main line as one zone about 400 feet of track. The other zones are yards and branch lines. For what you have described you can have the main line and rip as one zone and the yard as another. For a small layout with only one person running trains there is really no need to separate districts. The reason for setting up zones is that when someone shorts one zone it does not shut down the whole layout.
Pete
I pray every day I break even, Cause I can really use the money!
I started with nothing and still have most of it left!
The best factor for figuring out where to breakup the layout into zones is to figure out where trains will be running and what they will be doing. For example, you definitely want the yard and main to be at least 2 differetn zones. Switching in the yard is more likely to cause a derailment and short than a train running on the main, so by making the yard its own zone, it will affect only the yard switcher, while trains on the main will continue running. On a 4x8 that may be all you need, My layout is about 10x15 around a room, so I broke my main into two zones, the yard is a 3rd, and my staging tracks are the 4th. I may make the yet to be build cement plant a 5th, but I seldom expect to have enough people running trains that this wouldn;t be run by the yard crew anyway. Which I suspect is the way the prototype ran it anyway although I don;t have any documentation to prove it one way or the other.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
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