A friend of mine is trying to write an article. What would you say are the biggest recent high-tech advances in model trains and model train control?
How recent is recent?
I came back to the hobby a dozen or so years ago. For me, the "big advance" was DCC, which I embraced immediately. But, DCC has been around quite a while.
Maybe the answer is on-board sound? Sound decoders are much newer than DCC itself. Keep-alive systems to help engines continue to run over dead spots in the track are a new product that's come along in the last couple of years.
I haven't used them myself, but Arduino controllers are being used for a lot of home-built custom uses, such as automatic sequencing of structure illumination.
How about "static grass." This is a relatively new technique for scenery making. "Grass" is spread using a charged container with a high static charge, which causes the "grass" to stand on end as it strikes the glue on the surface, resulting in much more realistic field look than simple old sprinkled turf.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
I was going to say Arduinos (about which I know the square root of sweet tweet), keep alive circuits/devices (yay!!), maybe the Rail King stuff (??), Snot, flocking in general, plus its various nifty and realistic applications, extruded foam insulation board, 3D printers, ...just off the top of my head.
Static grass has been around for a long time. It might actually be older than ground foam as I recall seeing it back in the old days (1970s) when people were still using lichen for scenery. Arduino is new. So are keep alive capacitors. Another new thing is Bluetooth throttles which allow you to control your train with your smart phone. The newest frontier might be dead rail however the garden scale guys have been doing it using RC parts for several years.
Hello all,
LCC from the NMRA.
Hope this helps.
"Uhh...I didn’t know it was 'impossible' I just made it work...sorry"
dead rail systems using battery power.
Dead rail.
Right now I have another browser opened and reading quite an article about Rail Pro by a fellow who use to own Litchfield Station, an online DCC company. It is in the MRH forums. I cannot post the link here. It sure seems to answer a lot of questions for those who do not use it.
Rich
If you ever fall over in public, pick yourself up and say “sorry it’s been a while since I inhabited a body.” And just walk away.
3 D Printing at affordable prices has made "one of" models possible for more modelers