Sw# Id# Q?
Is there a conventional system for addressing turnouts that are dcc controlled? Or does one just start with 1 and go up from there? I'm going to have a total of 55 turnout motors on my layout and would like to get the addressing right the first time.
Thanks,
John
I had looked at the National Model Railroad Association (NMRA) Standards and Recommended Practices to see what they had to say. I never did find a definitive answer.
I also checked out a few Club's Standards and Recommended Practices available on the Internet and found some used four digit addresses for stationary controlled objects and two digit addresses for mobile objects. The four digit code was used so that the first two digits represented the block/module and the second two digits were the stationary device.
I thought about that too but on my small layout I use different switch addresses more frequently than engine addresses. So -
For the mobile decoders - I decided to use the four digit engine numbers of my engines and add 10## or 100# to the smaller numbered engines to get a four digit address. (I had used a label gun before to put the two digit address on the bottom of each engine to avoid pulling out a spreadsheet to figure out what was what at the beginning of an operating session
)
For the stationary decoders - I liked the 'block idea" of the Club so I divided the layout into four sections. The section number is the prefix and I can have up to 10 stationary decoder addresses per section.
Anyhow, 'convention' will depend on if you are connecting to a Club layout or finding what works best for organizing/operating your layout. With 55 decoders to address, unless you are planning on using a PC with a graphical interface, you may want to consider dividing the layout up into sections/blocks and prefacing the addresses with the section/block number...
