I am in the process of getting ready to start planning to think about maybe converting my as yet unbuilt nay unstarted layout to DCC! I tend to procrastinate sometimes, no most of the time, actually all of the time!

For this reason I have been doing a lot of research and reading on DCC and collecting supplies that I might need. One of the things I see a need for is fine wire to wire locos. Being cheap I like to use a lot of salvaged electrical equipment and I have been looking for a source of small flexible wires with several different colours. No luck so far.

Ive recently put TCS decoders with Keep Alives into my locomotives. Normally both of my locomotives run fine with the decoders, but occassionally they will just stop and flash the lights. There is also a noticable clicking noise. It is also worth mentioning that the problem usually occurs only at slow speeds. If I give them a nudge they return to normal operation.

I kinda' hate power bricks. They are always a pain to keep tidy and to mount.
Depending how you truss them up, they are difficult to remove later too.

Faced with mounting yet another power brick, this time for my RailPro system, I came up with a tidy little mount that allows you to easily slide the brick in and out with no other tools.

Available now from PDC at $14.50 including shipping in the US or Canada...

I am building a motorized overhead crane that I would like to put on my accessory bus.  I have two motors that I need to control, and would like to use  locomotive decoders for them.

If I understand the NMRA spec correctly, if bit 7 is set to 0 in CV29 then it is an accessory decoder. It appears that all of the regular locomotive decoders ignore bit 7, I have looked at both NCE and Digitrax decoders.

Do any of the other locomotives support changing bit 7?

Or is there another way to control the motor with an accessory decoder?

Thanks