can railmaster support 2 elinks

[Yelrow]

hi,  if i make my N gauge DCC, and use a second Elink, will RM support both, and can i allocate a seperate schematic track plan. john

[Fishmanoz]

John, yes and yes. You already know you can include a second controller in RM Setup. A number here run both eLink and Elite this way but no reason to not have two eLinks. 

Now the setup to achieve it gets more interesting. Locos are easy, just put OO and N locos in separate groups. But what to do about there being only one default track plan. Again to me that's easy - just put both layouts in the same plan and scroll from one to the other. That way you should be able to easily operate both at once. If you only want to operate them separately, then you could have separate track plans which you called up as needed in setup. 

Then if you have 2 eLinks, you will also have 2 licensed copies of RM. While it may not be simple right now, that leaves open the possibility of running both copies on one machine. They would have to be something like RM1 and RM2 if you didn't do it on separate partitions though. 

[Yelrow]

thanks fishy, its in the future, but that way, gives me a choice, as i also have TT, and might find it easier to convert one of them, as opposed to n Gauge.     would be quite fun to run DCC triang TT gauge. No doubt SOT will have thoughts on the ease or not of conversion. john      

[westernwill]

Why have 2 elinks, why not link the 2 power buses back to 1 elink and as noted above have both layouts on 1 plan. I am building a mixed OO and N gauge layout and have been thinking if I can control both from 1 version of railmaster. Hanheld devices could be used to control the 2 layouts separately or possibly a linked PC although that would need another RM licence.

Any thoughts or ideas would be welcome.

[RDS]

@westernwill

I wondered when I read the posts above, why it was necessary to have 2 e-links.  The only potential problem is lack of current but one e-link connected to 2 separate tracks using the 4 Amp PSU should be able to power as many Loco's or accessories as it would if it was just one layout.

It may get more interesting though when Loco Detection is available.

[Fishmanoz]

You are both right with some limitations. If only one eLink, you can only have one loco group active at one time and so all your OO and N locos would need to be in this group. I think your handhelds will only show the top 2 locos in your list so it would be difficult to have one controlling on one layout and another on the other. Then a short on either layout will take out both layouts. 

These limitations are overcome by using 2 eLinks. Or you could do the same by using 1 eLink and a booster.