@PeterB posted:@Jerryc86 I feel as if I drowned in *all* of the videos and stuff out there the second I went looking. I have no shortage of resources to explore. What I really wanted to know (which I think @Mellow Hudson Mike answered) was, 'given what your collective experience has taught you, what is a sane and manageable route to pursue?')
For my part, the Legacy product seems the most manageable approach for me, but I could be mistaken. Twelve years on the networking team of a federal agency, paired with five years of smart home construction and maintenance, gives me a modicum of confidence, but what I'm reading about MTH's DCS product doesn't seem ideal for my environment.
It is going to depend on your motive power. If you have or plan on having MTH PS2 and PS3 engines, you cannot control them with legacy (the obverse is true, though, DCS can control Lionel engines via a Legacy command base to DCS TIU cable). If you plan on running engines from both Lionel and MTH, then you need both command systems, pure and simple. The new DCS TIU and the Lionel base 3 use apps to control them, there is no remote for either (MTH has said they might...).
If you stay with Lionel products only, the new base 3 is able to control any of Lionel's engines, tmcc, legacy and lionchief. If you add a legacy powermaster assuming legacy only, you can use the legacy base to control conventional engines (the powermaster varies voltage to the track, like a transformer). If you go DCS only, the TIU has variable output that allows controlling conventional engines as well.
One of the features/problems of 3 rail is that there are two different, incompatible systems. In the HO/N/O scale world, DCC is a standard, while all systems offer some custom extensions, they all support the basic DCC command structure, same for DCS decoders.
