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A couple of years ago I decided to install a DCC system on my
Dombås layout. I started reading about all the different
systems on the market and to make a long story short I decided to buy
the North Coast Engineering Power House Pro system.
The NCE Power House Pro system consists of a small box which houses the
booster and command station (see picture below) and a controller, the
ProCab (see picture to the right).
(click on the picture to see a larger (1024*768) picture)
At first I simply hooked up the booster wires to the existing wires
of the main controller and by doing that I was able to run within a
couple of minutes. Later the wiring has changed a little bit.
On top of the NCE box sits the rrampmeter from TTX. This shows the current
track voltage (13.9V) and current (0.09 amps).
The following
picture shows a TTX PSFour, that is currently used for the booster power
distribution.
The layout is divided in four blocks (Dombås, Dovre/factory,
Trondheim staging and Åndalsnes staging) and each block is hooked up
to a PSFour output. This will prevent that shorts in one block shutdown the
whole layout. To the right is a 12 volt voltage regulator that is powering
the NCE BD20 (to the far right) that is used for block detection (for
a signal).
The BD20 visible in the picture detects a train leaving Dombås in the
direction of Oslo. Before the train leaves the station, the signal is set
to 'double green' by the engineer by means of a push button, after the train
leaves the stations and gets detected it will be set back to 'red'. Two
simular detectors can be found on the other end of the Dombås station
for two outgoing signal at that end (direction of Trondheim and Åndalsnes).
To have an extra controller around (for visitors etc...), I added a simple
engineers cab, the NCE Cab4p.
Separate pages will describe the installation of decoders in the locomotives
used on this layout and the addressing scheme used (see index)
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The NCE ProCab, the main controller and also used for all the programming.
This ProCab has been converted to the NCE wireless system, the antenna on
top the controller is visible evidence of that.
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