DCC Board
Overview
I have completed the wiring of what I call my “DCC Board” (well 95% complete). This board is a central location where my power supplies, boosters, and circuit breakers are housed. I’m going to try and describe how and why I did what I did for anyone who may be interested.
I decided to locate my board and all circuit breakers in one location so that I had one place to go if a short occurs to trouble shoot and know which district is shorting. Due to the size of the layout, this is feasible as my longest bus run should not be too much over 30’. Here is a picture of the board sitting above my workbench (which is a serious mess at this point).
Power Needs
In trying to determine how much power the layout was going to need, I did some estimating on the number of trains that I could foresee running at any given time during an operating session. Based on this type of estimate, you can figure out how many amps of power you will need. I decided to buy the 8 amp Super Chief unit. I later came across a DCS100 booster at a steal, so I bought it. So, I will end up with an 8 amp and a 5 amp booster, and this should give me some cushion in terms of power.
Power Districts
My next step was to figure out how to divide the layout up into ‘Power Districts’ and put them on dedicated circuit breakers. (Some people define a Power District as equal to a booster, and any division under it as sub-districts. I’m just calling them Districts.) There are a few reasons to break the layout up like this, but the simplest reason for me is if I have a short in the yard, I don’t want the whole mainline shut down, etc… Based on this concept, and considering the hardware I wanted to use (see below), I ended up with 8 districts as follows (see the track plan for reference):
1) North Staging
2) Lower Level (main line)
3) Markham Yard
4) Chicago (Reverse section)
5) Blast Furnace
6) Helix / South Staging / EJ&E Staging
7) Upper Level
Decatur (Reverse section)
Hardware
When it came down to choose hardware for power management, I quickly narrowed the options down to the Digitrax PM42 and Power Shields from (Tony’s Train Exchange. While I know several people who are using PM42’s and are happy with them, I decided to use Power Shields for a few reasons: they are solid state; they do not require a separate power source; they have some ancillary features that I like (see below); and the reversers serve as circuit breakers as well. Power Shields come designated as PS1, PS2, or PS4 based on the number of districts on the board, and PSRev which is the reverser unit.
Wiring and Features
One reason why I liked the Power Shields is a couple of ancillary features they have. They have the abilty to wire them to have remote switches to allow a hard reset of a short and to turn on or off power all together. I like the idea of having a hard reset to accommodate some of the power hungry sound units out there today. I also like the on/off feature so I can easily turn off power to an area to do some maintenance or if it is not being used. It also has a remote LED status capability which I liked. I got this idea from an article in MR in Jan 2005. As suggested in the article, I also wired an LED in line with the power out to show that a district is on.
Here is an overall shot of the board:
Here is a close up of the PowerShields:
Here is a shot of the SPST switches and LED’s:
