gregc Bernie On the other hand, what I would see as an improvement is to add a capacitor or even a rechargable battery to a loco (that the loco continously charges) with just enough power to give the loco power over frogs and other dead spots. Now, that would be a good idea :-) isn't it call a keep alive?
Bernie On the other hand, what I would see as an improvement is to add a capacitor or even a rechargable battery to a loco (that the loco continously charges) with just enough power to give the loco power over frogs and other dead spots. Now, that would be a good idea :-)
isn't it call a keep alive?
Yes and they've been around for more than a few years now. The Lenz USP has been around for around 12 years now.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
We keep hearing about these awesome new batteries - if they have an energy density that much greater than lithium-polymer then why aren't we seeing them in things like high end consumer electronics? The inside of a small form factor laptop, or a smartphone, or a tablet is almost ALL battery and that's to get 8-12 hours of battery life between charges. If there is a new battery with 10x the energy density then the smartphone and laptop makers would be ALL OVER it. Same size as tooday but 5-6 DAYS of battery life, or smaller with 2x the battery life, or even smaller with the same battery life.
I'll believe it when I see it. And even after it appears in high end electronc devices, the next stop will probably be battery powered RC, cars, copters, planes, quads. THEN it may trickle down to model trains - IF there is any demand for a cell smaller than a typical 1S Lipo. There may be little demand for something smaller, the damnd may be for the same size but lasting way longer. There needs to be a market for this outside of model railroading - on board battery in smaller scales is a niche within a niche hobby and is not going to be the driver. But if they could do it, wouldn;t you think someone like Apple would just love to have a machine with the power of the latest Macbook Pro in a device the size and weight of the Macbook Air with twice the battery life of the current Air?
This "we'd have these batteries but no one wants to commit to builing a manufacturing plant for such a rapidly changing technology" line sounds suspiciously like "the oil companies are suppressing the 100mpg carburetor" that STILL can be found in the back of magazines like Popular Mechanics. Tesla just built a HUGE factory just to make batteries - the Battery Wall uses the same battery technology found in the Tesla cars. Elon apparently did not get the memo that his plant will be obsolete in 8-9 months.
No, most of the new stuff is far safer than what we have now. You got to relize how much it will cost for all the new tooling, most of which is not found in currant production. This means you decide to go with one design but 6 months later a new design rolls out that has 20% more capacity, even 10% would make the first manufacturer go out of buisneess in short order. First time in history that tecnoligy is moving maybe a bit too fast, think nicad vs lithium happening at least once a year if not faster. Things like led's are getting better and faster as fast as Moore's law and the price has come way down. I lit my train room with CFL's less than 5 years ago, LED's were over $12 vs $1 for CFL's, power consumption was about the same. Converted last year to LED's for around $1.50 each but use about 60% of the energy, I was surprised that they used almost half the power, very surprised.
rrebell Just as a side note, the reason we do not have the new batterys now, and they are amazing, is that it would reqire plants to be built and with new breakthroughs every 6 to 9 months, no one wants to commit for fear of having old tecnoligy. I am not kidding, there are breakthroughs that often and not just building on something that is just an improvment but whole new ways of doing things. At some point someone will take the plunge but not yet.
Just as a side note, the reason we do not have the new batterys now, and they are amazing, is that it would reqire plants to be built and with new breakthroughs every 6 to 9 months, no one wants to commit for fear of having old tecnoligy. I am not kidding, there are breakthroughs that often and not just building on something that is just an improvment but whole new ways of doing things. At some point someone will take the plunge but not yet.
Also that new battery technology has to be tested and proven not to burn your house down. Probably not being done for the same reasons you stated.
BernieOn the other hand, what I would see as an improvement is to add a capacitor or even a rechargable battery to a loco (that the loco continously charges) with just enough power to give the loco power over frogs and other dead spots. Now, that would be a good idea :-)
greg - Philadelphia & Reading / Reading
No worries. Barring some HUGE breakthrough in battery technology, there's no way this will become the majority control method. DCC hasn't fully taken over after more than 15 years, no way will battery power take over. Since dead rail systems can coexist with DC and DCC trains, it will be there as a supplementary control system.
I sure hope not!!! Having to change batteries on all my locos constanly, or recharge them all between sessions, will be a huge pain. If this becomes the way of doing things, it will probably drive me out of the hobby.
I'm also into RC POV aircraft, but I only have two planes and a quadcopter that need to be charged between adventures. That's no big deal, and I accept there's no way to wire a plane to the ground during flight, lol.
But battery powered trains is a bad idea, IMO. On the other hand, what I would see as an improvement is to add a capacitor or even a rechargable battery to a loco (that the loco continously charges) with just enough power to give the loco power over frogs and other dead spots. Now, that would be a good idea :-)
Ring's not the only game in town. Tam Valley Depot and NWSL both have systems that work with DCC, in that they change the medium of signal transmission from through the rails to direct radio. You still use a DCC decoder with them so you can use your favorite (and certainly get better sound than you do with Ring's sound modules). Power can be through the rails or via on-board battery. NWSL does have the charging circuitry that allows you to recharge via the rails.
RRR_BethBr One of my particular interests in the time I was away from the MR hobby has been RC flight - a hobby that has been entirely transformed in the last 15 years by (primarily) lithium batteries, brushless electric motors, and spread-spectrum radio technology. I'm curious; is model railroading taking notice? Is there a(ny) movement towards battery-powered, radio controlled trains in popular indoor sizes (HO, in particular)? I'm imagining a layout that needs no track wiring, no reversing circuitry, no hunting down shorts and wiring faults underneath the benchwork and scenery. I haven't started the conversion to DCC yet, and I'm of half a mind not to bother. The potential for R/C just seems... better. Am I alone in this thinking?
One of my particular interests in the time I was away from the MR hobby has been RC flight - a hobby that has been entirely transformed in the last 15 years by (primarily) lithium batteries, brushless electric motors, and spread-spectrum radio technology.
I'm curious; is model railroading taking notice? Is there a(ny) movement towards battery-powered, radio controlled trains in popular indoor sizes (HO, in particular)?
I'm imagining a layout that needs no track wiring, no reversing circuitry, no hunting down shorts and wiring faults underneath the benchwork and scenery.
I haven't started the conversion to DCC yet, and I'm of half a mind not to bother. The potential for R/C just seems... better. Am I alone in this thinking?
I will stick with your question.. No opinions. Already too many of those.
Model train control is evolving even as we speak.
I found these links in the MRH forums about Ring Engineering's RailPro system. One DCC fellow who posted the links became a dealer and also administrates the RailPro User Group.
http://pdc.ca/rr/catalog/product/railpro-and-accessories/51
http://rpug.pdc.ca/
Last I knew, the company owner was in the MRH forums.
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.
The trouble with recharging from the track is it takes a bit more hardware and space is still a premium, today. Good news is batterys are 20% smaller than just last year.
selectorwhy would we try to eliminate feeding those rails...at all? It seems to me that the battery will need almost constant charging in order to keep up a healthy voltage, especially during demanding haulage, so it should be in contact with, and getting charge from, energized rails throughout the system.
Yes. Perhaps I was unclear when I said that I would have some of the rails unpowered. My point was that they could be left unpowered in areas where it is more convenient.
Examples: no more worrying about reversing loops causing a short circuit; just leave the whole reversing segment unpowered. And if you want to detect trains, you can leave a couple inches unpowered to sense current or as capacitance sensors. And you don't need to power your turnout frogs or install keep alives. And you don't need to clean your track much, or maybe at all. Cleaning track inside a tunnel sounds like a nuisance that fortunately I have not yet had to do.
For sure any track that is easy to wire up should be wired. I would guess if around half your track was powered you'd have smooth sailing but I have done no actual calculations to back that up.
First off the dirt on most peoples layout is the result of sparking when the wheels meet the rails (the black crud you wipe up, it was diagnosed by a chemist who anilized the stuff). New batteries -2"x-1"x3/4"
Thing is, I DON'T have these sort of problems. And I don't own any of those fancy-schmacy track cleaning cars, either. Nor do any of my locos have a keep alive device attached, other than what may have come witht he decoder, which doesn't keep the motor going anyway. My goal is always to be able to run a loco slowly and not have the headlight flicker - an LED reacts even faster then the sound or motor drive. There is no smoking allowed in my house, which probably helps. My last layout was in a spare bedroom, so the environment was fairly clean to begine with, but the one before that was in an unfinished basement - open ceiling joists above and unfinished cement walls and floor, and still no problems keeping trains running without sound hiccups and jerky action.
What am I doing different? I do paint the rails to kill the shine on all but the top. The only time I use a track cleaner is after painting to clean any stray paint off the railhead. I keep loco wheels clean using paper towels and alcohol. I do not run so much as ONE car with plastic wheels, everything gets metal wheelsets before it ever sits on the rails. I use every rail joiner (except where an insulating one is needed) for feeders. I DON'T solder all rail joints, but I will solder two pieces of flex together, then have a non-soldered joint, then the next two pieces are soldered, etc.
So what's different? Why do so many people seem to have issues with stalling and hesitation? Is it just that people who don;t have problems don;t post about it, so we are really looking at a skewed result? I don;t think I do anything 'out there' in terms of wiring - never used common rail, even with DC, but otherwise pretty standard stuff. Is it a difference between DCC systems? I don;t have problems on the club layout and that lives for weeks or months between shows in unheated trailers. The only issue is with older modules that use connector track pieces, even when new joiners are justs, those short sections often have no power, but the actual track on one of the sections, not so much as a flicker although there they DO run a multi-car cleaning train with solvent and a couple of different wiper cars. Usually when they bring out the cleaning train, I haven't been having any issues with my trains, and I think the people that ARE having problmes are just running over those short connectoor tracks. Also no plastic wheels allowed on the club layout, either. In both cases (my home and club), the DCC is Digitrax. Does that make a difference? I really doubt it.
I really wish I could tell exactly what I do differently than someone with a lot of problems. Because if I had a way to fix it, I could pay for my hobby by implementing my methods for people, or maybe writing a book about it.
selectorWhat confounds so many of us is that our trains stutter, stall, stop, or the sound cuts out, or some other indication that power to the decoders is just that much too intermittent...no matter how we wire our rails. I know this isn't such a big deal in DC, but in DCC it's terrible, and it severely detracts from being able to enjoy the experience of playing with our trains. If it were not such a problem, why would we have this 'solution' thread proposing that we eliminate power to the rails entirely?
I have never had these problems. I followed best practices in wiring. For my club layout we have invested in CMX cleaning cars, running 70% isopropyl alcohol on a 1 drip every 10 second cleaning. The only loss of power occurs when someone derails and/or collides with another train. This is 99% of the time a user or manufacturing defect vice wiring problems. I will probably invest in one once my new layout is built.
Also if you never clean your track, but rely on short powered sections to charge your locomotives, your train will pick up dirt on the non-powered section and drag it into the powered section. So you need to clean track anyway. (Anecdotal evidence due to some people not cleaning their track on their modules, wheels get dirty, dirt moves around layout on wheels, gets deposited where it wasnt before).
speedybee ... Any new track you lay can be (mostly) dead rail. All you need is the occasional section of live rail to give the battery a boost and the train can run indefinitely. ...
...
Any new track you lay can be (mostly) dead rail. All you need is the occasional section of live rail to give the battery a boost and the train can run indefinitely.
This sounds odd to me, or maybe just wishful thinking, or perhaps not very clear thinking.
What confounds so many of us is that our trains stutter, stall, stop, or the sound cuts out, or some other indication that power to the decoders is just that much too intermittent...no matter how we wire our rails. I know this isn't such a big deal in DC, but in DCC it's terrible, and it severely detracts from being able to enjoy the experience of playing with our trains. If it were not such a problem, why would we have this 'solution' thread proposing that we eliminate power to the rails entirely?
So, if continuity, or reliable pickup, or some other characterization of the problem IS the problem, and we need power to the rails to charge a 'buffer' of sorts, the battery, why would we try to eliminate feeding those rails...at all? It seems to me that the battery will need almost constant charging in order to keep up a healthy voltage, especially during demanding haulage, so it should be in contact with, and getting charge from, energized rails throughout the system. That is to say, most of the rails, not just a few selected ones here and there, should be offering the charging system some voltage to keep the battery as close to fully charged as possible. If the power goes out, I would want a fully charged battery so that I can play for maybe 20-30 minutes, not one that is down to half its capacity.
I am not in disagreement that we should rethink our approach to running trains. Something has to change to improve reliability if DCC is going to be the way for the foreseeable future. Unless we can include robust batteries that permit us to run trains for up to an hour at a time between charges, we need to charge constantly...not intermittently. Constant recharging means wiring our rails pretty much as we already do.
Surprisingly I don't think anyone in this thread has mentioned this yet, but the Tam Valley Depot has developed a clever method of dead rails. Basically you take your existing DCC system, and you plug in a wireless transmitter in parallel with the DCC signal that broadcasts the DCC signal through the air.
Then you take your DCC locomotive and install a wireless receiver that takes the airborne DCC signal and feeds it into the decoder. Power comes from a small battery that gets charged by the rails.
The nice thing is that you can ease yourself into it. If you have an existing DCC layout and locomotives, they will still function normally. You can gradually convert the locomotives one by one. Any new track you lay can be (mostly) dead rail. All you need is the occasional section of live rail to give the battery a boost and the train can run indefinitely.
The pre-built components are a little pricey but if you're willing to DIY the electronics, it shouldn't be too expensive. For a token $5 they sell the exact instructions that you need to assemble everything.
7j43kShould you choose NOT to use the rails to charge the battery--essentially dead rail, signal detection is very simple. You do it like the real railroads.
Yes, which is DC on the track. A wheel shorts the circuit and de-energizes a the relay in the relay cabinet....
https://www.google.com/search?q=railroad+track+circuit&biw=1438&bih=719&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj5sLzExYjSAhXj5YMKHRXlDbYQ_AUIBigB#imgrc=_ZXf8BstT8d3jM:
So you are back to powering the track...which you needed to do before, except you just spent $80 per locomotive, to eliminate wiring and track cleaning, which you will need to do anyway if you want signals. This assumes you want to do it like the prototype. Optical detectors are a different story.
Unless you want Equipment Defect Detectors, which I believe are actually optical, both in model and prototype.
My point is there is more here than just train control. And like DC, DCC isnt going away. There is too large a customer base, and there are too many limitations to batterypowered radio/bluetooth. As was previously mentioned, there will not be a standard for this until someone makes one open to use by anyone (re:Lenz and their DCC protocol), so yes you are stuck with whichever one manufacturer you choose. I would need to see a price point of $30 per locomotive and a battery that lasts 3+ hrs and fits into a 44ton or Plymouth switcher (without an attached car) before I would even think about it. And even then I probably still would still not do it (re-batteries have a limited cyclic lifespan).
I asked Bachmann if I could consist their Blurail locomotive with my DCC locomotive. They said no. I informed them politely that their product is useless to me and would not be purchasing their Blurail offerings.
cowjock,$89-$95 for the CVP decoder? Yikes. And they're .6" x 2.4" x .25"...twice as long as a $20 Digitrax DH126D decoder. What's the range? How long will they run between charges? They don't mention that.
DigitalGriffin,Actually, Bernard Lenz gave his DCC protocol to the NMRA. The NMRA now "owns" it, and has improved upon it several times over the last 25+ years. But otherwise, yep, it's a free and open standard that anyone can use for free.
Battery tech will have to do the same thing for wide acceptance...and come up with a sub-$20 solution for locos. Even DCC didn't take off after the NMRA got the spec.'s. It took the sub-$20 decoder to really launch DCC.
That may be but the money you save in wireing ect., it should be a wash. Big bonus of battery is no track cleaning or gaping to worry about.
Batteries have a limited number of charge/discharge cycles and their power density drops with age. The wall socket is always 120V.
Alan
Freelancing the LK&O Railroad
joe323Interesting The NMRA does not seem to have weighed in on this issue.
Don - Specializing in layout DC->DCC conversions
Modeling C&O transition era and steel industries There's Nothing Like Big Steam!
http://www.cvpusa.com/airwire_micro_decoder.php
Didn't relise Cvp had entered the market. I see wireless becoming an add on to DCC as I have just seen the first DCC couplers come online at a reasonable price, about $8 a car for the kits.
I have a Garden railroad that is totally dead rail using CVP. Wouldn't change a thing with it. I know they came out with a small wireless decoder for HO, battery would probably have to be put in a trailing car.
Cowjock
Cvp makes a battery board based on thier large scale version. It.is designed for live rail charging. So all.the switches and complicated track can be dead. While the rest can be live. Makes it usefully battery saver on grades. Drawing off track power.
The battery wireles. Isn't new. Been a large scale thing for years. Cvp finally.figured out how to package it for smaller scales. Just like.they brough dcc cost down and flexibility with the rail coming in the early 90st
A pessimist sees a dark tunnel
An optimist sees the light at the end of the tunnel
A realist sees a frieght train
An engineer sees three idiots standing on the tracks stairing blankly in space
Interesting The NMRA does not seem to have weighed in on this issue.
My perpective is that now having several locomotives and an NCE powercab it is unlikely that I am going to change to dead rail anytime soon. Even if I did it would not be until standards are drawn up for wireless control.
As for smartphones I have no problem with downloading an app and using it as a throttle. Even if the phone I am using becomes obsolete I can still use it as a standalone thottle. It need not be a functioning phone anymore.
Joe Staten Island West
I'm a newbe and yet to get my first "engine". Wow, a lot of great comments here. Kinda reminds me of film cameras going digital. So should my first "engine" be a rail inspection truck with flashing lights that I can drive off rail too?
Basicaly if you go for DCC ready, you can go DC, DCC or the new stuff (not new realy, just getting to the plug-n-play point though). Second if there is demand, there will be a stand alone throttle for the system by Bachmann but their object was to get people into it as cheap as possible. Last note Bachmann seems to go non priority on a lot of stuff, that is why the other company is not restricked from selling decoders.