Spent some time yesterday wiring up the main bus wires for my layout and realized I may have caused a problem with the cab bus.
I mounted the command station and booster near the center of the layout to keep my main runs as short as practical.
But I'm not sure if this is going to throw off the cab bus now. The diagram with the system shows the command station at one end and the cab plugs going out from it. My current plan would put the command station in the middle with 2 branches off it for the cab bus. It does not make a continuous loop (bad thing I know)
I understand the daisy chain idea but does the command station have to be at one end or the other? Will it work in the middle of the chain?
Modeling the Cleveland and Pittsburgh during the PennCentral era starting on the Cleveland lakefront and ending in Mingo junction
It should work if you split the cab bus into a 'T' configuration near the command station and branch out in both directions from there.
I have done that with an NCE DCC system with no adverse affect, and I see no reason why it wouldn't work equally well with any other brand.
I'm not familiar with the type of wire required for a Prodigy system, but for the NCE a 'T' splitter for telephone wire is what I used and it works just fine.
MRC uses 8 conductor wire and RJ45 jacks. They provide no technical details to tell if the twisted pair of regular Ethernet cable would cause any issues or not, the controllers have 8 conductor flat wire.
I would suspect that the base can be anywhere along a chain, not just at an end. Again, no details provided in the instructions. NCE and Digitrax illustrate both options - bus chaining to either side of the command sation or command station at one end. Another thing not mentioned clearly in the MRC manuals is that beyond a certain distance and/or with with more than a certian numbe rof cabs conencted, you need special powered versions of the cab panels to inject extra power.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
Hi RR,
Did more or less the same with our Prod, only we plugged into our main panel by means of a Din plug which acted as a feed to the rest of the layout, through DPDT switches. Which is same as a cab bus only a bit over the top, so we can run DC. Thats another story though.
As long as there are no crossed feeds( we did, between base-boards) you've cracked it. It also means handset leads don't have to reach the full length of layout, we used the middle feed socket for a handset and used the 2 outer ones to run to extention plates that run a pair of hadsets each at each end of the layout(if we enough bodys about). That's 6 operators, one to handle the points(switches) and the rest to play trains so to speak. Works for us.
Be in touch.
pick.
OK sounds like it's not so bad.
I'll be making my cab bus out of cat 5 cabes and the correct plugs (rj45 I think thy're called) Probably 35 feet of bus from the command station in both directions, planning on plugs every 8 feet
The main thing you have to be concerned with, if you're going to make your own cables, is plug orientation; i.e., straight through or crossover (telephone or data)? Hopefully you know which is required by the MRC system when it comes time to crimp plugs onto the cable.
I'm pretty sure it's data not straight through, been a while since I looked at it. I have some MRC cables and was just going to make longer copies of em.