Oh, I see. I met Jon once at York many years ago and he told me it would be no problem to have DCC control or work with railsounds. He even emailed me a picture of a circuit that would do it. Jon's a great guy and very smart too. I've been a 2 railer for about 10 years and back then what I wanted to do was have a DCC motor driver board that would hook up to RS. It would have been great to have DCC with that awesome Lionel sound. I have a couple of Lionel engines that I had 2 railed and I wanted to do this to those engines. However, the circuit board never materialized and I couldn't build just from a picture and no specifications. I'm no electrical engineer.
I hate to be negative but I seriously doubt the powers that be at Lionel will allow it. Their message to me is get hooked on our product and don't buy anything from anyone else. I realize it is business and they are out to make as much $$$ as possible but I just don't care all that much for TMCC/Legacy or DCS. I know TMCC/Legacy can do a lot of things that DCC can't and I know all about how they have so much more bandwidth and how they are so much better than DCC. It has been told to me time and time again on this forum. I don't begrudge anyone else's opinion. They are certainly entitled to it as I am entitled to mine. And I am not saying that the 3 rail systems are bad systems. When they work they are awesome! No doubt about it. What I like about DCC is #1) that the non-proprietary feature of it was created by model railroaders for model railroaders and #2)is that whenever I give any command to a locomotive 99.99999999 times out of a 100 that command is obeyed by the locomotive. With DCC you can forget that there even is CC system. It almost like you still have the ZW throttle in your hand. Just last night I was at Steve's house and I was talking to a guy who is called HO Bob (for the obvious reasons) and he said the same thing as me. It's not that there is anything wrong with Steve's layout it is just that once in a while you push a button on the remote and for whatever reason the command doesn't get to the locomotive. I never owned Legacy but I have seen this happen with both DCS and TMCC and I have seen it happen on every 3 rail layout I have ever operated on. I don't mean to say that it happens all that often, it usually is just once in a while but for me when I was in 3 rail it usually happened just before a collision! Seriously, when I first got TMCC in the late '90s it was so frustrating that I almost smashed it against the wall but as I later found out this was probably because of grounding issues. If only there was a forum back then I probably would have had a lot more fun with the trains. Anyway, sorry about rambling on.... At least MTH will have DCC compatibility that's a guarantee!
Looks like I won't be buying Lionel in O gauge or S scale! It's been about 12 years since I bought a Lionel locomotive. I think the last one I got was the Postwar Celebration Texas Special F3. Oh well.....
