DCC, Complaining About

Bernie Kempinski admitted in a recent post on his USMRR Aquia Line blog that he loves to complain about DCC, and this wasn't his first run at this most evergreen source of model railroading disappointment. He unleashed a torrent of bile on DCC quirks and incompatibility back in 2017 or so, which I somehow missed.

Regular readers here know that I certainly have my own DCC grievances, but I usually frame my DCC dyspepsia by expressing envy for the European approach to DCC. (Like, why don't we North American model railroaders have graphic interfaces on our controllers, seamless compatibility with our consumer gadgets like smart phones and tablets, and for the love of all that is good, standard decoder plugs?)

Bernie lamented in 2017 that the rat's nest of incompatible programming specs and protocols that cause various combinations of models, decoders, programmers, and controllers to not work well with each other. He also noted that a number of DCC products intended to work with computers are actually only narrowly compatible with a few types of computers and operating systems.

I've certainly experienced those very problems in my own adventures with DCC, which I finally resolved by acquiring a dedicated Windows 10 computer and then my ESU ECoS controller, which has sufficent amperage and support for multiple DCC and proprietary control protocols.

In other words, I solved my DCC problems by acquiring some major DCC artillery worth around a cool grand, although I got lucky acquiring the ECoS and the Windows 10 computer second-hand for half that.

Solving ordinary DCC challenges shouldn't bust the hobby budget.

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Another DCC observation: I've noticed that decoders are often defective right out of the package. Interestingly, the first DCC control system I ever bought, a Digitrax Zephyr, was also defective right out of the box. Are there perhaps low expectations for manufacturing quality in this space?

Fortunately, all of the DCC manufacturers I've dealt with have robust warranty policies. I haven't kept detailed track of my experiences with defective decoders, and I will freely accept that my own mishandling or misinstallation might have played a role, but I think around 10% of my 40 or so decoders--across several DCC brands--have had some kind of failure at or very shortly after installation. This failure rate did pick up with launch into N scale--maybe tiny decoders are more fragile and/or defect prone?

But I've had enough installation jobs stalled by the 2-4 week warranty return process to have noticed and make this complaint.

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Bernie's recent post reiterated his 2017 complaint that diesel sound, which he dismisses as "industrial noise," is the culprit behind possibly needless DCC complexity.

I agree with Bernie about industrial noise. Modern diesels and electrics do have a kind of sonic sameness, with some differences here and there. That sameness is exacerbated by the small speakers common to small HO and nearly all N scale locomotive models.

So that's where I will pile on to Bernie's specific complaint about sound--that (modern) locomotive sound is indeed so much noise, to which I will add that sound might just be a bridge too far for many smaller models. As a result, nearly all N scale and many HO models end up being expensive, unreliable little industrial noise makers.

One additional data point for this assessment is an experience I had at the 2018 O Scale convention here in Rockville, MD, last year. I was chatting with Tony Koester, and a sound-equipped O scale SW1500 that was running on a nearby modular layout was loud and high quality enough to interrupt our conversation! At this point, I realized that speaker size and installation make a critical difference to the model railroad sound experience.

I'm certainly not opposed to model railroad sound--I just think that tiny locomotive-based speakers might not be the optimal approach. On small layouts, stationary speakers--even cheap ones, like, say, computer speakers--would undoubtedly render sound more dynamically and faithfully than sugar-cube sized speakers encased in moving locomotive shells. They would also allow for other environmental sounds to be mixed in, such as right-of-way sounds (singing wire, something I've touched on previously), nature sounds (cicadas, for example, would be appropriate for the Old Line Corridor's wooded mid-Atlantic locale), and of course, Bernie's dreaded industrial noises.

The moral of the sound part of this story: maybe model rail manufacturers are expecting DCC to do too much, and maybe there are better ways to add the sonic dimension to our model railroads.