Distributed control system for model railroads?
Except for wiring of power feeds directly to the track the majority of wiring expense and labor is the point to point wiring of turnouts and other controlled accessories.
However modern commercial control systems have all but eliminated point to point wiring through the use of "bus" systems such as Modbus, TCP-IP and others. These systems allow for the use of universal plug and play devices which plug into the bus and virtually eliminate wiring hassles.
It appears that Lionel is adopting this type of system with their newly announced LCS ASC2, BPC2 and SER2 "bus" devices.
I would expect that MTH would introduce a similar "bus" system.
This would virtually eliminate the need for the MTH AIU units since individual relays would be provided in the specific MTH "bus" devices.
