DCC Control Guide

DCC Introduction

DCC is a simple way of wiring your model railway and controlling trains. However, it also allows you to develop a railway with far more operating features than you can have on a traditional DC powered layout.

With DCC, the track is live all the time - and each locomotive has a small microchip installed which reads signals sent along the track. These chips all have a different address- just like in a normal street of houses. When a signal is received which is addressed to a particular chip then it listens and undertakes those instructions, this may be asking it to move forward or stop.

All the other locomotives and their chips ignore this instruction as their addresses are different... so you can instruct many locomotives to do different things. Some locos can move forward, others can revers, whilst the remainder will stay stationery.

But with DCC you can also as the the chip to control more than the motor of a locomotive - for instance you can add a speaker and add sounds, you can run smoke generators inside steam engines, switch on lights inside the loco and the headlamps.

Because the track is live at all times, items such as coach lights also stay on all the time - unlike a traditional DC system where they go out as the locomotive stops! Once again with the use of a DCC chip inside a coach you can add more features - lights which you switch on and off, opening coach doors, the sounds of passengers and the guard shouting 'All aboard'.

The important thing is the level of complexity is up to you - at it's simples the system is just two wires from controller to track giving you the ability to drive the loco - not the track.

Controlling accessories:

^{You can use accessory decoders to operate a variety of items such as point motors, colour light signals, turntables and other operating accessories.}

^{Most accessory decoders can handle either point motors (pulse operation) or a simple 2 light signal (on-on operation). Here are some examples of more complex uses:}