cooped Posted June 12, 2011 Share Posted June 12, 2011 Hi Just thought I'd put this out there as I'm sure there are others who like me want to be able to run both Live Steam and regular DCC or DC trains and don't want to have to build seperate layouts for each. I have a 4' x 8' set up where I have wired for DCC and installed a switch to go beween the DCC power source and a pair of phono sockets. I soldered phono plugs onto the live steam power cord and also the power cord from a DC controller. Now I can run DCC with the switch one way or flick the switch the other way and run either live steam or DC. The downside is as the wiring is for DCC therefore you can only independantly control one DC loco or one live steam loco, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. You also of course have to take care not to have the wrong loco on the track on the wrong power, but not too hard to do that. The link below shows the wiring. It was fairly simple even for an electrically challenged person such as myself. http://s816.photobucket.com/albums/zz86/cooped/DCC%20DC%20live%20steam%20toggle/">http://s816.photobucket.com/albums/zz86/cooped/DCC%20DC%20live%20steam%20toggle/ I'm going to start building a larger layout soon (hopefully), not sure how I'll go about the same on that, but this works a charm here. Dan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rgmichel Posted June 13, 2011 Share Posted June 13, 2011 I thought about this a bit, but I have not done anything about it yet. It seems to me that you could have separate tracks for live steam and DCC, and use the live steam for mainline express running, and only switch to live steam on the dcc side when you want to bring a train into a station or other dcc section of the layout. Then you can isolate the live steam power, and keep running your dcc elsewhere on the layout. However, I think the there is always a chance you will fry a regular loco by forgetting it is there when you switch to lives steam. You would need to have some interlock warning between the two systems. The only other thing I have thought about is to put a 12 v zener diode on each dcc locomotive to make sure that it never actually sees 17 volts when the live steam is accidentally switched in. Have to think a bit more about that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cooped Posted June 15, 2011 Author Share Posted June 15, 2011 Wow,much more complicated than what I did.sounds doable though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rgmichel Posted June 15, 2011 Share Posted June 15, 2011 My live steam wish list includes a solution to this problem. I think that the two ought to be compatible, and the solution ought to be dcc. There is no point in thinking about dc too much, I don't think. It is possible to drop the voltage from 17v down to 12 volts using a zener, although this wastes a bit of power,and it is possible to code the signals differently for the dcc locos and the live steam locos. I think this all could be retrofit. I will put it on my todo list, which right now is too long for one human being. The biggest problem in my view is that I don't know how the commands are sent to the live steam loco. Those commands would have to be dcc compatible. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.