Software, Electronics and Railways

Hi! Welcome to my blog, where I hope to document my efforts to build an n scale railroad empire.

The sub-title of this blog is ‘Experiments in N Scale’ because for the most part that is what I’ll be doing. There are so many decisions to make – what code rail to use, how to build a cheap DCC set up, what to prototype, even what sort of layout to go for – that for the foreseeable future most of what I’ll be doing will be experiments of one sort or another. Hopefully I’ll end up with a fully DCC controlled basic layout that can be played with while a proper layout is designed and built.

Depending on how it goes, I am planning to build most of the DCC control stuff myself. This will probably consist of a MacBook running some software to control an Arduino which will then create the actual DCC data to send to a home made booster. I hope to eventually use an iPhone to use as the main controller for actually running things. Most of the software will be designed by me.

On the railway side I hope to build the turnouts myself and have already made a few. I documented how I did this in a previous blog but that blog unfortunately died. I still have some of the posts so I’ll try to recreate a bit of the old blog as well.

I love writing software and I’ve always been interested in electronics and making things, so building a model railway empire sounds like the perfect way to combine all three!