How to Use a Model Railroad DCC Block Occupancy Detector
Steve BarkleyDescription
Knowing where current is flowing can be essential to a well operated model railroad. When operations become more involved and you have multiple trains running at once, it’s important to have a complete sense of which lines are in use and which are clear should you need to alter your schedule. If you’re like us and you prefer to make the model railroad DCC on your layout run as smoothly and efficiently as possible, then it’s high time you add a block occupancy detector to your model railroad DCC operations. In this lesson, introduce the benefits of utilizing a block occupancy detector in your model railroad DCC system.
Adding a block occupancy detector to a model railroad DCC system
To help you discover the best way to utilize a block occupancy detector on your railroad, modeler and model railroad DCC expert Steve Barkley talks about how he likes to use the detector on his layouts. If you use a PC diagram to show in real-time what’s happening on your layout, you’ll love the added benefits that a block occupancy detector provides for your railroad.
Steve explains how the detector allows you to sense whether current is being drawn on any piece of track or block section, and then discusses how this can be a huge help to the diagram of your model railroad DCC system. For instance, you’ll learn how to edit your software to display an indicator light whenever a block is currently occupied, which will noticeably improve the way you set up and operate your layout. Consider adding a block occupancy detector to your model railroad DCC toolkit, and streamline the way you run your railroads!
The next component that we're going to talk about is a Block Occupancy Detector. And I have one here. What a Block Occupancy Detector does is to sense whether current is being drawn in any given piece of track or block section. For instance, we know that a locomotive will draw current. We know that a lighted car will draw current and later we can show how we can add resistor wheel sets to freight cars and passenger cars so that they will also draw current. What this does then is to sense whether there is power being drawn in a block. And if there is, I can put that on my track diagram on my PC and I can put a visual indication, in my layouts case, a small yellow rectangle, to show whether or not a block is occupied at any given time.
to short???
Who is the manufacturer of the block occupancy detector
I'm trying to set up a signal system. I model S Scale, code 100 flex track, DCC powered using CVP Easy DCC.