Feedback Bus

I'm posting this question for Malcolm Stewart.

Malcolm Stewart said:
Peter,

Here's my first question about constructing the Penobscot and Pee Dee garden railroad. As presently conceived, it'll ultimately have some 800' of roadbed. From my reading, this will require several aux power stations and polarity flippers. of

Eventually, I want to be highly automated; e.g., turnouts remotely controlled, crossing signals in synch with traffic, and the like. My reading leads me to the belief that a feedback signal is a facilitator of this.

I notice on a schematic that I have that the feedback signal reports to the central control station. Can I use a single system-wide bus for feedback or should there be dedicated feedback to the station that controls each power zone?

Malcolm Stewart

PS I'd intended to put this on the general blackboard, but am too green to know how to do it.
 

Russ Bellinis

Active Member
I'm not sure that I understand what is meant by the term "feedback signal." I think he would need to run dcc to do this, and that dcc could do all that he wants to do easily. Regarding the question about a system wide feedback buss vs a separate buss for each power zone, I can only speak to the CVP Products Easy DCC system. They use a command station that is then connected to booster units to boost power to the trains. If a railroad is big enough, then they reccommend multiple booster units that are isolated from each other with each booster powering a power zone. All commands go through the command station, so in that case you would use one single feedback buss for the whole system. I think this is probably standard dcc practice, but I don't know about other dcc systems.
 
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