Where to begin?

Thomas& Friends has been running for a while now using the EZ-command and two command companions at the front of the layout, which has proved very good, a few problems arise, when lots of button presses at once corrupt things, nothing a power cycle can't solve!

I have bought tried and tested and sold on many DCC controllers for use on the layout but nothing really seemed as simple and straight forward as the EZ-command.

As the layout has expanded and I have a few more sound locos I wanted a little bit more power and started looking at what I could replace the EZ-commands with.

I have the Powercab and initially thought of using this with a couple of engineers cabs at the front a few issues with this!

1. No way of knowing if anybody has selected a different loco.

2. At the exhibitions I've been to and taken along the Powercab nobody was interested in it, all I get asked is "what about Hornby"

Going back to my initial concept of providing a layout for the children to operate I really had to go with the Hornby stuff.

Lets be right at Christmas all the children want is a train set, undoubtedly that will be a Hornby train set and what will be in there but a Hornby Select.

The new Railmaster software also had an impact in this, as I'm sure it will appeal to alot of the PC generation and as it's specifically designed to work with the Eilte it left me with little choice.

I don't rate the Hornby controllers much, not very intuitive, clunky function operation and very expensive for what they are, I mean RRP £199 for the Elite and £99 for a Select!!!!!!

PowerCab, Dynamis, Digitrax all offer something for that sort of money which is way better!!

Still I can't convince people about which DCC controller to buy and it's not about that, the layout was to let the children play trains and maybe start them off in the hobby, if using Hornby makes that happen so be it, if they stay interested and want to upgrade, the original controllers can soon be sold on.

Most of the time you can pick the controllers up for much less than RRP and the Selects coming in a train set make them fairly cheap anyway.

So that was it, Elite and two Selects were bought off Ebay.......less than RRP I might add :-) took a while to find and win them but it does happen.

So there we go, two Selects will be at the front of the layout with the Elite at the back, I suppose it's sort of an upgrade as I now have a program track ouput and can read/write cv's, can control all of the points with the controllers as well as using the push buttons on the mimic panel.

I programmed the two SMD82's with the Elite starting at address 60.....and you know what it all works, the Selects will operate the SMD82's things are looking up.

The Elite has to be in Classic mode though, then I found one of the Selects wouldn't operate the same point, it always had to be the address plus 3...it had version 1.0 of the firmware, the other Select had V1.1

I had a reply about this from Hornby it's all to do with the way this version of firmware assigns the address, I have a two page explanation, if anybody wants a copy PM me.

Suffice to say, both Selects are heading to Hornby for a firmware update to V1.2....I hope, I just asked for the latest firmware.

It's an easy check, reset the Select and on power up it flashes 30 in the display then a number 10, 11 or 12 these are the firmware version numbers.

So there we go, I know I've slated the Hornby controllers but they do work and I will be setting up the Elite with loco and point names as soon as I can.

I will also have a play about with Railmaster, just to see what it can do.

Cheers

Ian