Professor Phlogiston rides again

Monday morning - 16/02/04

Cluck, cluck. Gibber, gibber. My old man's a mushroom...

Electricity and model railway enthusiasts don't seem to mix, or so you'd think if you'd studied the monthly comics at your leisure over the last few decades. On the one hand you've got the twelve-part "Making Simple Two-Rail Wiring Infinitely Complex" articles written by pipe-smoking, cardigan-wearing boffins, seemingly incapable of contemplating a circuit that doesn't include a Scammell-load of War Ministry surplus relays. On the other hand, it appears, you have Joseph E Punter cowering behind his thrift shop sofa, occasionally peering mistrustfully over the antimacassars at the H&M Safety Minor throbbing menacingly on the table - humming, arcing and generally interfering with the BBC World Service. An uneasy stalemate ("fortunately Hampton Throbwell was wired by the Professor Phlogiston, the club's tame particle physicist") at the best of times, but then DCC puts in an appearance and the whole world allegedly goes ga-ga, underpants on it's head and editorial pencils firmly up it's nose.

For me, the thing about DCC (or one thing, anyway) is it does what it says on the tin with little or no fuss. It's fairly plug'n'play (certainly more so than traditional wiring) and as a consumer I don't need to know how it works any more than I need to understand the innards of the TV remote control. A complete contrast to the picture presented in most magazine articles I've read, where it's still very firmly in the mad scientist camp. Aided by his trusty assistant Igor, ("yeth, mathter") the deranged DCC enthusiast cavorts in front of banks of equipment in his mountain-top castle while the electrical storm rages all around. You just know he's kitted out in a white lab coat with a slide-rule in the top pocket, and wearing one of those light-on-the-head thingies favoured by gynaecologists ("you can thee all the way to her tonthilth, mathter") as he scampers round, throwing Big Switches.

One of this month's comics contains some appallingly inaccurate bilge about DCC, regurgitating most of the common myths that make it look complicated, including some particular unfavourites of mine:

DCC friendly points - this is complete and utter b*ll*cks. DCC requires exactly the same wiring for pointwork as does ye olde DC. Pointwork that worked on ye olde DC will work on DCC as it did before. Better wiring techniques that give greater reliability do so equally well under DCC and ye olde DC. Short-circuits don't suddenly start appearing just because you've gone DCC. There is no such thing as a DCC friendly point, or an unfriendly one for that matter.
DCC short-circuits cause explosions, forest fires and holes in the ozone layer - again, this is mindless piffle, an unthinkingly recycled urban myth. The maximum oomph (if I might get technical for but one moment) able to flow through a short-circuit is dictated by my transformer, and is the same whether I've plugged my DCC system into it or my trusty Gaugemaster of many years standing. The trouble seems to be that with all the talk of power-boosters and such that comes with DCC, the more excitable elements of the hobby seem to think they're well on the way to building a fully armed and operational Death Star.

I have innumerable derailments and short-circuits on my layout, caused almost without exception by idiot user (me!) error. Ignoring signals and driving a train into a point set against you will do the job everytime. You'll get a short-circuit regardless of whether you personally like to believe your points are friendly, tea-and-biscuits-with-DCC types, or at the more hostile, shovelling-dog-turds-through-the-letterbox end of the market. It makes no difference whatsover. Of course, when the inevitable short-circuits do occur (metal tools or watch-straps across the track are another favourite with me) what you need is reliable short-circuit protection built into your hardware. DCC wins hands-down there, my Lenz equipment shutting off much more rapidly and reliably than any of my legacy DC kit. Job done - every time.

I find the inclusion of such blatant misinformation irresponsible in the extreme. Anything with the wow-factor and repeat purchasability of DCC has got to be good for the hobby as a whole and retailers' tills especially - why try and make something so simple seem so forbidding? It's an attitude that is particularly perplexing when sitting, as it does, alongside the blindly-buy-whatever-the-trade-offers policy adopted by most magazines. Fortunately, for every article that gives you the impression that you need to be a computer whizz-kid to use DCC, there are hundreds of people who've bought things like the Lenz Compact and are up and running without knowing they were supposed to find it difficult. Whilst the boffins are building decoder testers, playing with complex-looking software with speed-curve graphs and plugging car headlight bulbs into their layout wiring (I kid you not!) the world is moving on. We'll be upstairs playing trains, if you want us...