Bit by the TMCC ground plane bug

Thanks for posting the solution. That adds to the collective knowledge base here.

I was really just thanking those who came up with the solution. The other thread i mentioned has more details bur it is a closed thread so I couldn’t reply directly.
It worked for me though so I hope someone else can benefit from it. Thx.

Maybe I got some bad information. Are we saying that the ground plane only needs to be where the trouble spots are? I had two spots crop up where my highline crossed the double mains below at an angle so, following what I thought was the proper fix, a buddy came over one day and we spent about 3 hours threading 80 some feet of wire through 18 feet of tunnel and up and over the lift bridge. The two problems area were within a few feet of the grounding point and involved no tunneling and no lift bridge.

I believe what I was told was the plane had to be a continuous loop, sort of like what we did many years ago to improve TV reception.

Thoughts?

You only need a ground plane in the problem areas.  Also, do NOT connect your long ground wire into a loop like the letter O.  Leave a gap in it like the letter C (with the ends close together), this will make it work better.

At our club’s old location, we have the same problem inside a tunnel with track running above. Simple fix wrapping a wire around a copper pipe that ran into a wall under our layout and ran the wire  inside the tunnel above the track.
Other problem area was on a different side of the layout near our Lionel powerhouses and TPCs. Simple fix- ran a wire under the bridge over the affected track area and attached the wire to COM on the TPC which is earth ground. I believe earth ground is pin 5 on the command base computer port. I could be wrong with the PIN number but it can used attaching your earth ground wire there.

Correct, either pin-5 of the serial port or the outside of the barrel connector for power is the earth ground connection.