After a half century of model railroading, I am still amazed at the things the mind can invent to enrich our hobby. I suppose it was inevitable that the digital age and model railroading should merge. Digital Command Control has been around for a while now, but its momentum seems to be picking up. Our readers have been clamoring for more DCC-related information, and we’ve been scrambling to cover it.

We’ve had two writers covering the DCC beat for the past three years, John Lee and Dave Lotz. Once or twice a year, they give us an in-depth evaluation on a major DCC product. Publisher Mike Lindsay and I felt that we needed even more coverage, a monthly column. Enter R. W. Boehm (rhymes with “home”). Russ is an affable guy, curious as a cat, well-grounded in DCC (pun intended), and a good writer/photographer. He will be contributing a column each month — “Straight Talk On DCC” — along with various reviews. The column will be pointed in the general direction of those who haven’t yet come to DCC or are fairly new to the topic. As with the rest of our magazine, Russ will be trying to help our readers match up with the products which best serve their needs.

While I am not a DCC user, I sense that DCC has come a long way but also has a way to go yet. Product maturity is required. The electric trains of 1920 had to meet the technology expectations of that period, addressing a society with over a third of the households lacking electricity; modern electric trains of 2002 have no less demand placed upon them. Atlas is delivering its HO locomotives decoder-equipped. All you have to do is lift off the shell, remove a jumper, and your loco is ready for DCC. If you don’t remove the jumper, it is ready for regular DC track power. That is very good product maturity. Other manufacturers are building locomotives with plugs and other methods for easily installing decoders. That’s pretty good product maturity. Some are still grounding their motors to the frame and mostly ignoring DCC.

Once again we are faced with model railroading’s age-old dilemma: do we preach to the choir or the non-believers? This ties into the whole “ready-to-run versus kit” debate. The word I keep getting is that simplified DCC beginner sets are very limited, and systems which are not so limited are neither simplified nor for beginners. Computer interfaces are generally RS-232, a technology level which has been obsolete for at least a decade (most of a century in computer years), and software is not consistent in operating system support, never mind that there is nothing for the Mac. This is not product maturity.

Relative maturity aside, Model Railroad News will continue to explore DCC. I am considering equipping my new layout with it, though that outcome is not entirely certain at this point. Others of our writers are checking out DCC or installing it as we speak. Also on the market are some interesting alternatives which we will also examine. Lionel’s TrainMaster Command Control is not DCC, though it has many similarities, and it is expanding into the Large Scale world through USA Trains. Polk’s Model Craft Hobbies (Aristo-Craft Trains and Crest Power products) has 75 mHz radio control versions of their Train Engineer line that plug into their recent locomotives and can be wired into others. They also have produced a radio control receiver for HO that plugs right into a standard HO DCC socket. Marklin is producing yet another concept called Delta which is similar to DCC but is not quite the same.

It all reminds me of the good old days when 4-track, 8-track, and cassette were duking it out to be your car stereo tape choice. In those days, 8-track looked to be the winner, and cassette was the dark horse in the field. Cassettes, of course, went on to dominate the market for 30 years while 8-track died off and almost no one remembers 4-track. Also noteworthy is the fact that cassette is now being displaced by CD and MP3 technologies. Time marches on.

Some form of Command Control will become the standard for our hobby, but which one is far from certain at this point. Your letters are welcome, and review samples will be tested. We will faithfully report to you whatever we learn along the way, playing no favorites. Each of us, like you, will settle on what works well and is affordable. Right now, DC track power works pretty well for me and isn’t costing me anything extra, but I have a feeling that’s about to change.

John Sipple
Editor