There's more than one way...
There's more than one way to get R/C in your HO locomotives.
Check out
Aristocraft's Crest HO Train Engineer for starters.
It is a complete system with a hand-held transmitter/Throttle. And the on-board receiver/decoder. You have the option of either on-board battery packs. (Usually contained in a boxcar pulled behind the engine) Or for the more daring, and/or for larger locomotives, you can put the batteries directly in the locomotive.
Switching from standard rechargeable batteries, you could go with using tiny lithium batteries, like the kind used for cameras and/or hearing aids. They last a suprisingly long time and put out amount of juice for their size, but they aren't rechargeable.
With the
Aristocraft's Crest HO Train Engineer you also have the option of still drawing power from the rails. Just set your DC power supply to full power and let the
Aristocraft's Crest HO Train Engineer do the rest. The only thing that you have to worry about is the dreaded reverse loops. Otherwise, it is supposed to be more reliable than regular DCC, because it isn't affected as much by dirty track, because it isn't getting the control sygnal from the rails.
The only real drawback to the
Aristocraft's Crest HO Train Engineer is that it doesn't support sound. The on-board receiver/decoder is all in one without contacts for attaching a sepirate sound decoder.
There is another DCC company that is working on an R/C system.
In this case, you have an R/C throttle and an R/C receiver on-board the locomotive. But in this case, it receives the sygnal, and then converts the sygnal to DCC. So, you would have the receiver, PLUS, a DCC decoder on-board the locomotive. This takes up a little more space, but it gives you the option of sound.
This is being made by
CVP who makes EasyDCC and Railcommand. They are calling the new R/C system the "AirWire 900". for more information on the
"AirWire 900" look here.
Lastly, there are the guys in Texas, that I mentioned earlier, who are kitbashing from R/C racecars.
So there are a few R/C options, with a few more coming soon....