Isn't traditional transformer control the defacto standard for O gauge/scale? 

With the MTH DCS app I can run Lionel TMCC but not anything higher without an investment. That is probably small cost in comparison to changing all the engines to a "new" standard. MTH DCS can run DCC as well.  Of course there is the issue of dead electronics on an engine fleet.  ERR may be the fix for those repairs.

Maybe dead rail systems are the way to go avoiding issues with both DCS and Legacy on larger layouts?  Maybe @Tom Tee can comment on those options.

I suppose it would be possible for a DCC board manufacturer to position replacement boards for O. I am not sure what we gain or why I would want to migrate to a 3rd system.

I think I'll stick to DCS and transformer control.

@West Side Joe,

There existing base of older 'O' Gauge is very large.  Most of these units that are command-controlled use the proprietary systems, and owners have come to know them and like them, although there are some who are completely frustrated with them.  Changing new product to DCC now would not please most 'O' Gaugers at all, the first group because of incompatibility, the second because of the continued complexity experienced with DCC.

Offering it as an option has already been tried.  Newer MTH locos are fitted with both MTH-proprietary DCS and DCC.  Do many people use this DCC, or do they largely stick with DCS?

There is some interest in migrating over time.  However, as @ScoutingDad has pointed out if you have a large collection converting your existing stuff to DCC would be very expensive and time consuming.

One last point.  The chip shortage, and the aging of the electronics in our fleets, are showing us that our beloved locomotives with proprietary controls are getting harder to maintain every day.  At some point they may become impractical to operate without a going to a standard like DCC.

A big shift to DCC may indeed eventually happen, but it would likely take years instead of being instantaneous.

Mike

Joe

The Uniform Standard for Train Control is operate the train to keep it from flying of the tracks and keep from running into other trains!

Charlie

I appreciate all your responses. I think the great benefit of a migration to a uniform standard is the ability for smaller companies to bring limited run models to market. So instead of my pining away for a 3-rail BMT Standard or R-4 with opening doors from Lionel, somebody else hungrier and nimbler may actually make one. I can dream...although I know I won't live that long! 😂

I seriously doubt that I'll be moving from Legacy/TMCC and DCS for my command operations.  I can't imagine the landscape changing enough in my lifetime to have me making such a massive move!

@West Side Joe posted:

I appreciate all your responses. I think the great benefit of a migration to a uniform standard is the ability for smaller companies to bring limited run models to market. So instead of my pining away for a 3-rail BMT Standard or R-4 with opening doors from Lionel, somebody else hungrier and nimbler may actually make one. I can dream...although I know I won't live that long! 😂

I've always assumed that that Lionel and MTH preferred a proprietary system to keep sales dollars coming to them.  HO has enough market share where it is probably more profitable or at least less costly for a loco manufacturer to outsource the decoder as they all do.  Similar to how mobile phone manufactures used to change the charging plug design on every new generation/model so you had to buy your extra charger from them.

Brendan

DCC is not just in the smaller scales.   All the mfg make decoders that will handle larger O scale motors.    And Most of the O Scale 2 railers I know use DCC.    Many of these are not plug-in but individual install ie you solder the wires where they go yourself or hire one of the many installers to do it.   As mentioned many of the mfg and installers are smaller businesses.    The nice thing about using DCC is the same controls and how to use them work when I operate on friends HO or N Scale layouts.    Most of my round robin group is HO.

Many of you have heard of brass scale models which have been built in small runs since the 1950s and generally represent unique prototypes Especially in steam models.     Many of us have a nice stable of these models representing our favorite roads.      We like our models and have spent decades obtaining them.    So at a model train show, one of the two major vendors was presenting how wonderful their proprietary system worked to a friend of mine.    So my friend asked the presenter where he could buy the control boards and what they cost.    The vendor guy told him he could not buy the boards separately, he needed to buy new engines.     This immediately turned my friend off from any interest in this proprietary system.    This attitude/marketing plan on the vendor's part explains why two railers generally ignore the big 3 rail mfgs.

Prrjim, which manufacturers produce DCC for O scale motors? I'm not questioning, but asking, because this is something I have been wanting to look into. Thanks.

The BlueRailTrains BlueRailDCC 5A module coupled with an available 4A DCC decoder will power and control OGauge quite well. I've done this and previously reported reported on it.

The reason there is no single standard in three rail is, as many know, historical.  Lionel developed TMCC when DCC was not easily and affordably useful in three rail, and they were the "800 pound gorilla."  Similarly, dominant players like Marklin and LGB developed their own proprietary systems for their locos.  In HO and N there was no equivalent single dominant manufacturer who could claim their system would be the rule, and Lenz made their technology available to all, and the DCC standard came about in HO and N. It's certainly used heavily in the niche scales of 2 rail O gauge, large scale, Z gauge and S as well.  But many S gaugers use TMCC/Legacy as Lionel is still a dominant player in that gauge.

Three rail O gauge is a fairly large "niche" in the hobby, but it has been largely dominated by Lionel for the last 100 plus years, with a major role for MTH and DCS from 2002 to the present. With Mike Wolf retiring and no plans for any succession, it's not clear to me that DCS has much long term future, but that remains to be seen.  Certainly there is no reason for Lionel to worry about whether their proprietary system is stopping most people from entering the hobby.  LionChief is more reliable, cheaper and easier to use than any of these systems, and that's what is in their starter sets.

@Landsteiner posted:

LionChief is more reliable, cheaper and easier to use than any of these systems, and that's what is in their starter sets.

Yes, but ...

1.) LionChief doesn't have all the features of its bigger brothers (including DCC)

2.) LionChief only has fewer issues in setup and configuration (reliability) because it doesn't have all the features

3.) LionChief is only cheaper because it doesn't have all the features, and is manufactured in much higher volumes (accruing economies of scale) due to the large number of starter sets sold

4.) LionChief is only easier to use because it doesn't have all the features

Mike

The only Lionchief stuff I have is a few of the Lionchief Plus 2.0 engines, and that's because I can operate them with TMCC.

LionChief is designed for beginners and those who like simple or inexpensive.  It's totally compatible on a layout with TMCC/DCS/Legacy if you want to operate equipment with more features.  It's a command control system that controls forward/reverse/sounds which is not much higher in price than simple DC train sets in HO and N that do less, so that's a virtue.  Not relevant to more experienced or advanced model railroaders true.  But Lionel sells a lot of sets each year so they may be doing something right.

@ConrailFan posted:

Prrjim, which manufacturers produce DCC for O scale motors? I'm not questioning, but asking, because this is something I have been wanting to look into. Thanks.

Loksound 5L or 5XL

Soundtraxx 4400

TCS WOW501

All can handle O scale power requirements. There are others too, I'm sure.  And some old school ones like the NCE408 that are motor only, and you can add on a sound decoder to them. Some single motor drives can be run off a Tsunami 2200 decoder, but check the stall amps before you risk blowing the decoder up.

Soundtraxx is coming out with the Blunami boards that enables the operation of full DCC functions without a base station via an apple device. Once the BLU-4400 boards come out, one hopes that will be the beginning of a push to get rid of these proprietary things. The decoders are cheaper than a TMCC board set, do more and sound better.  DCS has DCC, but its DCS first and a decoder second, which makes it not all that great compared to a real one (and the wiring is all backwards).

A uniform standard does have benefits for the people using the product. With something like DCC, it means you aren't tied to one brands controller, if someone else offers a better value for the money let's say, you buy that. If a DCC controller goes bad in an engine, with modern DCC engines it is a standard plug and swapping it out is easy, plus if the controller in there isn't available,you can get a board from another vendor (I am not an expert on DCC, and I realize there are wrinkles to this, DCC allows extensions I believe that can be proprietary to a maker. So if X offered some feature not in standard DCC, and you put in a controller made by Y, you could lose that. On the other hand, if X is no longer available, and your board blows, you can still run the full standard DCC command set if you swap the board out).  Also allows some competition on pricing.

I looked it up and I believe DCC was developed after Lionel came out with TMCC (which is not totally a surprise, given that you have a lot more space in an O sized engine or tender, was easier for Lionel to work with that space. In 2 rail scale, O is a nice market and they wouldn't develop something that worked only in 2 rail scale O engines). Because scale modelling had a long established standards group, the NMRA, it would have been difficult for any manufacturer to develop and promote a proprietary system (there were some systems, like Lenz and Marklin at the time). When Lionel came out with TMCC they at the time pretty much were 3 rail O and 3 rail has no standards other than three rails 1.x" gauge and it runs on AC power maxing at like 18v.

So Lionel introduced TMCC. MTH developed their own standard PS 2/DCS that was totally different than TMCC . There is some limited 'universality', as long as you have a lionel command base DCS can talk to it (originally DCS only supported TMCC commands; I don't know if DCS can access any/all legacy specific commands). To me that isn't universal, if you have to buy a lionel command base, then especially with wifi control might as well just use the proprietary apps to control Lionel/MTH *shrug*.

DCS cannot control DCC. MTH supported DCC in their PS 3.0 decoders. I suspect they did that primarily because they moved into HO (to a lesser extent, because some MTH engines were designed as 3/2 rail) and it would make no sense to have totally different base command between HO and O (plus I also suspect they hoped HO users would like PS3/DCS functions not supported in DCC). Mike mentioned when they were developing PS 3.0 that they were able to make the command board small to enable use in HO (and implied that would allow for more complex 3 rail O boards while staying in the space in O engines).

Given the current and future state of 3 rail I doubt DCC will become the standard in 3 rail, I think Legacy and DCS are going to be what is on Lionel/MTH engines going forward, whatever that means. It is the same way that we won't bluetooth or wifi direct control of engines become the default, despite it being supported in Legacy 2.0 for example, the command base is the past and future king it looks like.

@West Side Joe posted:

This question is posed out of ignorance, so I am anxious to be corrected / educated: It is my impression that no standard exists for three rail "O" train control like there is for "N" or "HO", that is, the NMRA DCC standards. I see a great deal of discussion in the forums about, for instance, how to run Lionel and MTH together, or even how to run different generations of Lionel trains together. I don't see much of that in HO or N, the controls all being implemented by DCC boards that meet NMRA standards and can be added to any DCC-ready loco. It seems to me that proprietary control systems are built into the three rail locos, instead of following the example of the smaller scales, which I think would greatly enhance compatibility and enjoyment of the hobby. And perhaps the best reason of all, a uniform control standard could blow the market wide open to smaller manufacturers without proprietary control systems and greatly increase the range of models available to 3 rail modelers. Am I wrong in my perceptions? If not, is there any interest in standardizing control systems in three rail O trains?

If you continue to apply common sense and logic to this issue, you will be severely punished!

At the same time as the recent turmoil with O-gauge control systems (compatibility, availability, price), I happened to become involved with operating sessions on several HO scale layouts.  As I've become more familiar with using DCC, the mish-mash of O-gauge control systems seems dumber every day.  What's really interesting is that DCC components continue to be readily available - maybe a little more scarce than before, but FAR easier to find than Lionel or MTH stuff during the past couple of years.

Part of the issue, IMO, is that the NMRA has a long history of creating standards and has a lot of clout in that regard, while TCA, LCCA, etc. have historically focused on collecting trains rather than operating them.

@West Side Joe posted:

This question is posed out of ignorance, so I am anxious to be corrected / educated: It is my impression that no standard exists for three rail "O" train control like there is for "N" or "HO", that is, the NMRA DCC standards. I see a great deal of discussion in the forums about, for instance, how to run Lionel and MTH together, or even how to run different generations of Lionel trains together. I don't see much of that in HO or N, the controls all being implemented by DCC boards that meet NMRA standards and can be added to any DCC-ready loco. It seems to me that proprietary control systems are built into the three rail locos, instead of following the example of the smaller scales, which I think would greatly enhance compatibility and enjoyment of the hobby. And perhaps the best reason of all, a uniform control standard could blow the market wide open to smaller manufacturers without proprietary control systems and greatly increase the range of models available to 3 rail modelers. Am I wrong in my perceptions? If not, is there any interest in standardizing control systems in three rail O trains?

Joe, IMO you are 100% correct.

I am happy with DCS for MTH Proto 2 and 3, and using dedicated remotes to run LC+ and the LionChief Universal Remote to run LC+2.0 and Legacy. Arnold

@Arnold D. Cribari posted:

I am happy with DCS for MTH Proto 2 and 3, and using dedicated remotes to run LC+ and the LionChief Universal Remote to run LC+2.0 and Legacy. Arnold

I would not be happy with running my Legacy locomotives with the LC Universal Remote, that's for sure.  The loss of fine speed control, the absence of any of the advanced lighting controls, the loss of the quilling whistle, no more variable labor sounds based on throttle, train brake, and momentum settings, etc.

@bigkid posted:

I looked it up and I believe DCC was developed after Lionel came out with TMCC

DCC came out well before TMCC.  Lionel said at the time that they looked at DCC, but Lionel engines at the time (1995) had the Pullmor motors and not can motors.  There were no DCC decoders at the time that could handle anywhere near the amps that the Pullmor motors required.  They were also concerned that sparking of the pickup rollers on dirty track would play havoc with the commands being sent imbedded in the track power.  So, they developed TMCC with motor drivers that could handle the amperage and with a radio transmission method that doesn't require squeaky clean track.

I only got into three rail O scale because of the Lionel subway set and its opening doors. In retrospect, had I appreciated that I was comitting to a proprietary control system and limiting myself as to future model availability, I might have reconsidered. But on the other hand, I wouldn't have created my subway station modules and I wouldn't have become aware of a whole new universe of modeling activity. So, it's kind of coulda, woulda, shoulda as they say in New Joisy...

@gunrunnerjohn posted:

I would not be happy with running my Legacy locomotives with the LC Universal Remote, that's for sure.  The loss of fine speed control, the absence of any of the advanced lighting controls, the loss of the quilling whistle, no more variable labor sounds based on throttle, train brake, and momentum settings, etc.

John, your points are well taken but for someone like me, who loves the basics of command control, gets a little anxious in dealing with technology, believes in KISS, and wants to minimize the possibility of things going wrong, the LC Universal Remote fills my needs for running Legacy.

All I care about is speed control, whistle, bell and the electrocouplers for switching. I also love whistle steam on my one Legacy steamer. Whistle steam requires nothing more than pressing the whistle button on the Universal Remote.

I think that the priority for me, and I'm not alone, is to relax when running my trains, and to minimize the need for repairs. That's why Postwar and the basics of DCS, LC+, LC+2.0 and running Legacy and LC+2.0 on the Universal Remite works for me.

I also almost always only run 1 train at a time eventhough I can easily run 2 trains simultaneously on my 2 independently powered interconnected main lines. I'm more relaxed when running 1 train at a time.

Arnold

@Mallard4468 posted:

As I've become more familiar with using DCC, the mish-mash of O-gauge control systems seems dumber every day.

Define "dumber".

There is no one entity here that has made a dumb decision, i.e. one that was in a position to set a standard and didn't.  In fact, both Lionel and MTH attempted to.  The timeline mentioned above, if correct, proves this.  Lionel's system came first, before DCC, then MTH's, also before DCC.

What were they supposed to do when DCC came out?  Drop everything and roll over to it?  In hindsight that may have been a good idea, but you could also see that it would not have been a good business decision at the time given the size of the investment that each of them had made.

"Dumb" implies a clearly bad decision made by someone.  There is no someone here.  It was a collective decision between many.  Groups, especially unorganized ones as in this situation, don't make dumb decisions when there's no clear leader in charge.  Instead they make inefficient ones.

The best example of this is the lack of coordination over VHS (JVC) vs Beta (Sony) back in the VCR days.

We may not like the outcome, but we know how it came about.

Mike

@Bob posted:

DCC came out well before TMCC.  Lionel said at the time that they looked at DCC, but Lionel engines at the time (1995) had the Pullmor motors and not can motors.  There were no DCC decoders at the time that could handle anywhere near the amps that the Pullmor motors required.  They were also concerned that sparking of the pickup rollers on dirty track would play havoc with the commands being sent imbedded in the track power.  So, they developed TMCC with motor drivers that could handle the amperage and with a radio transmission method that doesn't require squeaky clean track.

You are correct, though it wasn't that long before, I looked it up, DCC was announced in 1993, TMCC came out in 1994. I wonder though if even they could make DCC work with the then engines with Pullmor engines, if they would have gone that route. Original DCC wasn't that feature rich, especially with things like sound, so I wonder if Lionel would have gone proprietary anyway.

In the end it doesn't matter, and once they came up with separate systems the odds of a standardized system went out the window, especially with the bad blood that existed.

There's some truth in the various timelines cited above, but there's also some nuance.

From https://www.nmra.org/dcc-working-group - the roots of DCC go back to 1964, discussed in MR 1978, and NMRA standards were published in January 1994.  However, one key point is that the NMRA started discussing DCC standards in the late 1980s, so this was while Lionel was developing TMCC.  Surely Lionel was aware of this (if not, they weren't paying attention) but chose not to participate.  They could have done better.

As standards were introduced, did Lionel try to see if there was some common ground?  And MTH clearly had plenty of time to be more compatible, but also chose not to.  At least MTH figured out a way to run TMCC engines under DCS. 

@Mallard4468 and others,

All this analysis of whether the wrong decisions were made by Lionel and MTH over 25 years ago is quite irrelevant towards "fixing the problem."

On the other hand, if you're implying that the same types of decisions are being made over and over again, year in and year out since then, then you're very much correct.

Unfortunately, if you're Lionel or MTH and you've gone with your custom solution for 25 years how likely are you to change your mind prior to the 26th without some sort of very persuasive prodding?

A small group of us complaining is not "very persuasive prodding".

There is no groundswell here yet.  Can we wait long enough to see it arrive?

Mike

@Mallard4468 posted:

There's some truth in the various timelines cited above, but there's also some nuance.

From https://www.nmra.org/dcc-working-group - the roots of DCC go back to 1964, discussed in MR 1978, and NMRA standards were published in January 1994.  However, one key point is that the NMRA started discussing DCC standards in the late 1980s, so this was while Lionel was developing TMCC.  Surely Lionel was aware of this (if not, they weren't paying attention) but chose not to participate.  They could have done better.

As standards were introduced, did Lionel try to see if there was some common ground?  And MTH clearly had plenty of time to be more compatible, but also chose not to.  At least MTH figured out a way to run TMCC engines under DCS.

You can make the point that Lionel was more generous than MTH, in that the command sequences for TMCC were documented so that MTH could control a TMCC command base. MTH did not do the same thing with DCS commands (and I am not sure how easily Lionel could have controlled a DCS TIU, given DCS is a 2 way protocol).  It took MTH almost 10 years to come out with DCS (2002 vs 1994), and that likely was one of the reasons MTH offered TMCC compatibility, by then there would have been a lot of tmcc engines out there and MTH only had a very few offerings, that cross compatibility was an advantage for them to get people to buy their engines, for Lionel the reverse wouldn't do much for them even if possible. 20 years later there isn't much reason or ability for MTH' or Lionel to develop a new system (the Base 3 is just an amalgamation of what came before with a variation on two way communication). In the end if you want to run both kinds of engines, in reality you are buying both systems anyway so cross compatibility these days of apps and wifi makes little sense to me.

Anyone read the book Genius of the Beast?

Given the history of electronics since we all lived it ... not sure if train engine controls could have been developed earlier than they were. Let alone a standard.

1967 and 1968 - first hand held calculator and then RAM (random access memory) invented

1975 first digital camera by Kodak but not commercialized till the 1990's  (and between there people walked on  the moon)

1977 first Apple computer

1984 the first MAC computer

1993 Newton PDA (personal digital assistant)  Perhaps this is where electronics are small enough to be considered for controls. As I recall it was some time in the early 90s we switched from analog to digital controls for industrial purposes.

1997 WiFi Standards for consumer products developed.

After that a whole slew of electronic devices and services came into being. 

Seems like yesterday!  Anyone remember programming computers with punch cards? Or the TI994A which needed a cassette tape to record and run a program? VHS v Beta wars?

I am just glad we have what we have today.

@ScoutingDad posted:

Anyone remember programming computers with punch cards? Or the TI994A which needed a cassette tape to record and run a program? VHS v Beta wars?

I was with a startup company from 1969 thru 1974, we created an on-line wholesale accounting package using Selectric typewriter terminals running on the IBM-360 Model 40.  I lost count of all the card I punched programming most of the on-line code and a significant portion of the off-line report generation code using 80 column cards.  We had two 20 drawer card chests that each had a capacity of 60,000 cards, they were almost full of the cards the comprised the whole system.  My, how things have changed, I can store 1,000 times that amount of data on a tiny fingernail sized card!

"I have Lionchief Plus and also Legacy.  I like things simple so I run both with the Universal remote."

I have both TMCC and Legacy, and when I'm testing a new loco on my floor layout these days, I use the Universal Remote as well. No need to hook up the command base(s), for one thing, if I've disconnected them.  This may change when I get more organized .

@gunrunnerjohn posted:

I was with a startup company from 1969 thru 1974, we created an on-line wholesale accounting package using Selectric typewriter terminals running on the IBM-360 Model 40.  I lost count of all the card I punched programming most of the on-line code and a significant portion of the off-line report generation code using 80 column cards.  We had two 20 drawer card chests that each had a capacity of 60,000 cards, they were almost full of the cards the comprised the whole system.  My, how things have changed, I can store 1,000 times that amount of data on a tiny fingernail sized card!

We had two room-sized, mechanized rolodexes for our cards. 

Brendan

Ah old home week. The IBM 704 was even better, plug board wiring too *lol*. I was at the Johnson space center not that long ago and the kid doing the tour showed a slide rule and ppl gasped..and pointed out a smart phone prob has more total capacity than NASA had in the late 60s.

In some ways the two command systems are like the IBM 360&other proprietary systems,an anachronism.

These days most enterprise systems run Linux or variants, on the desktop the mac os proprietary but is dwarfed by windows.

DCC is more like Linux or Windows machines in it's approach.

Speaking of NASA, the lunar lander module only had a 24 step computer.   

My brother and I for lack of knowledge used to change the order of my father's punch cards from his college programs he wrote and saved in boxes.  Eventually we got them as scrap paper.

The story I heard was during the time TMCC was in development, getting DCC to work on a typical 3-rail layout, what with it's sparking open-frame AC motors, solenoids, vibrotors, etc and all the electrical noise they generate was a nightmare and more trouble than it was worth, hence (speculation) it was thought that a system using radio frequency signals would work better in the electrically rough-and-tumble environment of the average 3-rail AC layout.

---PCJ

@ScoutingDad posted:

Anyone read the book Genius of the Beast?

Given the history of electronics since we all lived it ... not sure if train engine controls could have been developed earlier than they were. Let alone a standard.

1967 and 1968 - first hand held calculator and then RAM (random access memory) invented

1975 first digital camera by Kodak but not commercialized till the 1990's  (and between there people walked on  the moon)

1977 first Apple computer

1984 the first MAC computer

1993 Newton PDA (personal digital assistant)  Perhaps this is where electronics are small enough to be considered for controls. As I recall it was some time in the early 90s we switched from analog to digital controls for industrial purposes.

1997 WiFi Standards for consumer products developed.

After that a whole slew of electronic devices and services came into being.

Seems like yesterday!  Anyone remember programming computers with punch cards? Or the TI994A which needed a cassette tape to record and run a program? VHS v Beta wars?

I am just glad we have what we have today.

Yes, I started programming with punched cards using both the IBM 026 and 029 card punches.  I remember using a 1200 baud VT-50 connected to a DECsystem-10 and thinking I'd died and gone to heaven.

In 1974 I recall reading an article in an IEEE publication (can't recall the journal's name) about micro-processors controlling an electric train.  Meanwhile, West Virginia University and the US Department of Transportation were subjecting us students to a live-fire exercise in inconvenience and failure called the PRT (Personal Rapid Transit).

As to a standard or universal control system for 3-rail trains, that would take negotiation / diplomacy worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.   

Back before the control wars started, DCC would have been the ideal candidate.  Unfortunately, it didn't play well in the 3-rail electrical environment.  I wish the NMRA had pushed harder for a standard in O gauge;  DCC has been a huge benefit to HO and N scales.

The next opportunity was the licensing of TMCC, which Lionel offered to all other vendors.  Unfortunately, MTH decided to roll their own.  And later on, Lionel introduced Legacy, which is also a closed system (not licensed to others).  And now we have LionChief, which is a 3rd option.  All of these systems have their technological strengths and weaknesses, which I am not going to discuss.

As an IT professional and systems integrator for over 40 years and a summa cum laude graduate of the School of Hard Knocks, I am a firm believer in the KISS principle.  In any case, my preferences on control systems are well known.

So I don't see a standard arriving any time soon (or ever if I'm honest).

George

@G3750 posted:

So I don't see a standard arriving any time soon (or ever if I'm honest).

DITTO!

We're stuck with what we have, at least as far as my crystal ball can see.