TPC 300/400 daisy chain???

The control wire, (DAT and COM), is light gauge, probably 22 or 24 gauge.  I used a twisted pair cat 5 wire to connect all devices to the Command Base.   Note the blue/blue white stripe wire, or green/green white stripe  wire.  There is a Lionel cable with a 9 pin connector that plugs into the TMCC Command Base. Only two of the 9 pins are used. Grey connector and cable top of the Command Base lower right pictured. The Dat/Com wires are daisy chained, (one device to the next),  to the (10) devices pictured. (2) TPC's, Track Power Controllers, silver boxes, (2) BPC's, Block Power Controllers, left tan boxes, and (6) ASC's, Accessory Switch Controllers, tan boxes upper center of picture.  

Thanks Mike, 

I really appreciate all your posts on electrical and scenery. Your pics are great. Happy Holidays,

Bob

Mike CT,

   Very impressive sir, add the Legacy base and Cab2 and you are maxed out!

PCRR/Dave

Thank you,

Mike CT

Hopefully, you are not trying to run several TPCs on a Legacy Base.  There is a problem with not enough "juice" available from the 9-pin connector to control several TPCs.

Dale,

I run three TPC400's with a single Legacy command base without issue. Is that unusual?  Thanks.

It may be the total count of devices.  There are 10 pictured above. I changed the two IC Controls BPC's to newer Lionel BPC's and all went south.  Backed-up, repaired and re-installed the IC Controls BPC and the world was good again.  I don't have Legacy.

Three is OK, but five is iffy.  An AVC also counts as a TPC.  Including a Zstuff Data Wire Driver makes matters worse.

Don' have Legacy yet, just TMCC and two TPCs. 

Bob

I guess then I'm on the brink with my one Legacy Command base - three TPC 400's and two SC-2's.  

The SC-2 and all the other small-format accessory devices don't load down the data bus very much.  They don't have optocouplers, which are the current hogs on the big boxes and Zstuff.

Well, the SC-2 doesn't load the bus at all, it's a TMCC receiver and has no connection to the serial bus from the command base.

Thanks for the clarifications.  I'm assuming then too my Z-Stuff optical detectors and signals used in several locations on the layout are of no matter either since they are set up simply with power and connections to each other - no connection to the Legacy system.  

I don't use the Z-Stuff products, but if they're not connected to the Legacy serial data lines, they aren't a factor.

 Each switch motor has a TMCC code that works from the Cab 1 handheld remote.

Thanks Mike, as I said, I don't use them, so I don't really know how they're designed.

I ran this this setup for over ten years.  TMCC with all the IC Controls and Lionel boxes.  It can handle it.  That is two TPC3000s.  2 BPCs for 8 blocks of track, 3 ASCs for 11 switches ( capacity is 12),  1 ASC to power lights and accessories like the sawmill and lumberjacks, 2 OTCs for 4 uncoupling and 2 operating tracks, 2 AMCs, which operated a gantry crane and a log loader, and an ARC which has the capacity of ten recordings.  All worked flawlessly for all those years.  A lot of fun. 

If you are referring to connecting a second or third TPC, in my case I got frustrated trying to get those small wires into the huge terminals, so I spliced the thin gauge wires to 14 gauge THHN, using red and green, then ran that into two Wago wire nuts, then "star wired" to each TPC.

Large Acme transformer upper left is 750 watts of accessory power at 12 volts. It can be wired for 24 volts.