In what is most definitely the last episode of this story I’m going to talk about what happened in my last 4 months working in the US, but first a quick recap of the modelling scene in the US.

Firstly, remember, there are virtually no clubs as we would recognise them, at least around Washington DC.  OK, I did eventually find one near where we lived, it was based in the Station House at Vienna, Virginia; they had built a multilevel layout in H0 inside the building; they held open houses about once a month where they operated the layout for members of the public.  I visited it maybe half a dozen times and whilst marvelling at the layout I don’t think was really railway modelling as we would recognise it, it seemed to run more along the lines of a minor tourist attraction.  This Google Street View shows the station building and the camera is sitting on the course of the old Washington & Old Dominion Railway.  Roughly where the cycle can be seen there was a caboose which Alec and myself used to climb up into.  There is nothing here I can see to say if the group is still going and because street view hasn’t ventured down the cycleway on the old railway we can’t see the front of the building to read any notices; that said, the building does look well cared for and is clearly maintained in the style of an old American station.

Back to the mainstream:  Most of the people I met in the model railroading scene either had a basement layout or they operated one for someone else.  If you were a member of the National Model Railroad Association or NMRA then your local Chapter would organise a Home Layout Tour each winter season where you could go and visit layouts that were normally closed to the public.

The other sort of modelling, also largely sponsored through the NMRA at the time, was modular modelling, on the N Gauge side the standard and whole modular movement was known as N-Track.  As I had fallen into the N Gauge world through my association with Peter and the CORy I did get to go to one of the regular N-Track modular meets; they got together on one Sunday afternoon/evening a month in a school not far from where we were living in Burke, VA.  They would meet at about 3PM, assemble their modules for about an hour, run trains and socialise until about 8PM, spend an hour packing up and then go home until next month. 

As I didn’t have a module, was only a transitory visitor (so had no intention of building one) and had no stock to run I didn’t really fit the profile that they wanted as a member – if I remember correctly the rules actually said you had to bring a module if you attended more than twice although I think that was more to allow them to regulate membership rather than a hard and fast rule.

So, back to the story.  In the summer of 1996 the Annual National N Track Convention was due to come to Washington DC., well Alexandria actually, and as a part of that gathering there was to be a home layout tour which Peter managed to become a part of.  What happened next is a bit of a mystery, but one Friday in January he announced that this would be the last operating session for a while as starting the next week we were going to be converting the layout to DCC.  It seems that what he had done was managed to negotiate a deal with one of the big DCC suppliers that if he was on the Home Layout Tour he could DCC the layout at a fraction of the retail cost, but that layout had to be fully operational in DCC mode by the weekend of the N-Track Convention and if it wasn’t you had to pay full price.  Remember: this was 1996 and DCC was very “new” so this was an early advertising ploy for the suppliers.

The next week all hell broke loose, we separated all the boards and removed anything that wasn’t firmly attached to the layout.  Next, one board at a time, we upended the board so that we could work on both the sceniced surface and underside at the same time, and the rewire commenced. 

To understand what we were doing we need a quick revisit to what I described as “necessary actions to move a train” in the main part of the narrative.  As built, the layout was wired for Cab Control.  I think everyone knows that Cab Control means that if you have more than one controller it is possible select which controller has control of a particular section of the layout by selecting the appropriate “Cab” by a switch.  Traditionally on a UK layout you would find two, or at the most three, cabs.  In the case of the CORy there were – I seem to remember – six, yes six cabs. 

The selection of a particular cab was by the use of a rotary switch and a toggle switch; you flicked the toggle switch “off”, turned the rotary switch to the cab you were working on and then flicked the toggle switch back on.  What the toggle switch did was to disconnect the output of the rotary switch from the layout, if you didn’t use the toggle switch first as the rotary switch was turned if it connected to a cab that was “live” from being used elsewhere on the layout there was a real risk that you would suddenly find trains lurching unexpectedly back or forward under momentary control of someone else. 

Now, Peter’s “user requirement” was that if this didn’t work we needed to be able to roll back to analogue operation fairly instantly.  The problem he had was that with six cabs – all of which were used in the general operation of the layout – and a rotary switch that was only able to support 6 inputs – it wasn’t possible to do the blindingly obvious “thing” of simply wiring one of the cabs to the DCC system and then sitting back and playing trains again; no, we had to do a complete rewire with a parallel system.

Step one on each board was to insert a completely new set of droppers, one to each piece of rail on the board.  This is where I learnt to fold up a neat piece of solid wire and solder it to the web of a piece of rail.  I’m not sure what size of wire we used (it was an American Wire Gauge single conductor after all) but we had to put a new dropper on every single piece of rail on each baseboard, these dropper wires were all led back to the control panel for that area of the layout.  At the same time we created a “bus” of wires which we braided together along each baseboard, roughly following the course of the line.  This bus consisted of six wires, the two DCC track wires, and a 16V AC and a 12V DC accessory supply. 

Next we…  Well, I’m not quite sure what happened next because I got temporarily seconded to an organisation in New Orleans, LA, for a couple of weeks (which actually took me out of circulation for nearly a month of Friday meets) and when I got back the control panels were in the process of being disconnected and coupled up to the new wiring loom.  The way this was being done was to cut the old wiring loom between each control panel and the layout and insert a plug and socket into it – so that it could be disconnected or reconnected as required.  A new wiring loom had been created on each panel duplicating the point controls and providing a couple of sockets for the DCC handsets, this was connected through to all the new droppers (but not through the section switching on the panels) and the bus from the base unit and power supply. 

I probably haven’t explained that very well, it sounds horrendously complicated but the effect of the way it was done meant that you could operate the layout as an analogue system, power it down and unplug all the control panels from the layout, and then plug in the other set of connections between panels and layout, power up the DCC system and off we go… 

Unfortunately the way work was going for me at that point effectively took me out of the loop for a good couple of months (we were now into May and I was returning to the UK in mid-July), I was on a horrendous roundabout of meetings and trips away whilst trying to make sure my relief was inducted into a different part of the USN organisation from the one I was working for, and simultaneously transferring the function of my department to a different organisation in New Orleans.  And you thought the British Government was convoluted…

Of course, Peter also had the problem of converting all the locos to DCC as well.  This he had for the most part completed the last time I visited him in the latter part of June before we left in mid-July.  Don’t forget, this was before the dawn of the current genre of chips with 6, 8, 18 or 21 pin chips; no, to chip a loco you had to cut wires and solder new connections – and don’t forget, this was being done in N Gauge with US outline locomotives.  On that visit the layout had just become operational in its new DCC guise and I got to at least run trains up and down on the line even if I didn’t get to do a proper operating session. 

And that was my experience of converting a layout to DCC.  It probably wasn’t a good example of how to do it and I have to say that to this day it has coloured my view of DCC.  Have you ever asked me what I think of DCC?  My answer will almost certainly have been “Never let anyone tell you that it is just 2 wires, it isn’t”; now you can see why.  And converting locos?  Well, as I’ve just pointed out this was the very early days, no “plug-in” chips, everything on a wiring loom that had to be trimmed and soldered on in a very confined space and the body refitted without destroying the detailing; and, of course, the chips were somewhat less reliable than they are today.  One of the reasons I give of fighting shy of converting my stock is that I do have a couple of kit-builds that utilise Black Beetle (or similar) bogies that actually site the motor inside the bogie in a supposedly “sealed for life” unit; I have met a DCC supplier who has offered to chip one of these for me – at a cost which I have chosen to ignore.

So there we are, a quick canter through my experiences as an American modeller.  I hope you have found it informative – and hopefully inspiring.  I have had some feedback which suggests that there are a number of members of the Fareham Club who would be interested in looking at some more “formal” operating sessions when the world gets back to some sort of normality. 

My Work here is done I think, writing a blog has been an interesting experience and I'm now actively thinking about how we could use it to contribute to the Club's communications strategy in the future.