I recently bought the bachmann e-z command and i must say I really like it. The people at the hobby store tried to steer me away from it and towards a zephyr but for what i needed i thought the e-z command was the way to go. It was the simpliest thing i ever used , took it out of the box, plugged it in, and followed the programming instructions and within minutes i was in operation. For someone with limited train experience i was impressed with its useability and i would have no problems recommending it to some one in my situation!!!!

helps alot bob. Right now i have a 3.6 ft x 5 ft layout and i ran all my feeder wires 26 gauge to th center of the table and ran two bus wires 18 gauge from the controller to the feeder wires. Runs great dc wise but i,m not sure if it will hold enough power for dcc....What is your opinion bob? I only plan to run 2 trains on this small layout.

Has anyone ever used the prodigy express dcc contrlooer by MRC and have you any advice about this unit. Is it user friendly? Is it compatible with all decoders? Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

Perfect ....thank you , i will give it a try!!

When we tested it at the hobby shop we actually did that. We ran it on dcc with the headlight on and then we stopped it with the light left on and moved it to the dc track and the light would not work. I dont know how it suppose to work but from all that i read the light should work normally whether you run it on dcc or dc.

I just bought a kato canadian pacific loco with a dcc digitrax decoder installed and it was used but in good shape. I am not running dcc right now but i bought it for future expansion, it works fine on my dc track but the lights dont come on when i run it. I took it to a local hobby store do verify that the decoder was installed and that it worked fine. They tested everything and it worked great .....even the lights but they dont come on when you run the loco on dc power. Is this normal or is there something i can do to get the lights to work on my track?

I have used the micheals plaster cloth the last two times and it worked great......my scenery looked awesome!!!! I was at a local hobby shop in edmonton and figured i would get some more and bought the woodland scenics stuff and to say the least .........it was garbage, it wasnt workable like the michaels stuff....you would dip it in the water and when you put it to your scene it was almost dry and not workable. I tried leaving it in the water longer then all you got was cloth. Long story short the michaels brand was the best for me!!!

i am running my track now with a bachmann dc controller and it seems to work fine....not running a good loco on it but ir runs okay. i will try a dcc system check on it to see if it will work.....web site was very insightful.....thank you!!!

I am gonna have to get a book on wiring!!! lol . If your feeder wires are only maximum 6 inches how do you get them to your bus wire? Do you run multiple bus wires to each feeder wire and them back to your power pack?

Really? I have my layout on a 3.6 ft x 5 ft board and what i did was run all the feeder wires basically to the center of the table and then attach all the feeder wires together and then to the bus wires. I'm new at this and this is my first layout so any advice would be greatly appreciated. My bus wires would be no problem to change but i dont wanna fool with the feeder wires. They were pretty hard to solder to the rails i cant imagine soldering a bigger wire than a 26 gauge.

I am wondering what you have to do different in the way of wiring to add a dcc power supply to your track? I have my track wired with 18 gauge bus wire and 26 gauge feeder wire, i think my track is over wired when it comes to the amount of feeder wire locations..lol.... My question is .,...can i just hook up a bachmann e-z command to my two bus wires the way it is or do i have to do something different?

I tried that plaster cloth.......works great, easy to work with and it sets up in minutes!!! I found it at Michaels,,,,pretty cheap actually, i got a 15 ft x 8 inch roll for 10 bucks with one of their 40% off coupons.

i am doing some mountains for my layout, covered foam with paper mache and now i'm ready for the final coats. what kind of material can you use for the final coats? i was told i could use drywall plaster which is great because i got a 20 litre pail just sitting around!! any advice would be great.

once you have the track laid out how do you determine what the track radius is? Is there a certain way to measure what the radius is? I got my track laid out and i ran a piece of 11.25 track over it and there are no curves tighter than that but there is one area where i am going from one side of a switch to another switch and it is about 10 inches apart and tey dont really line up so i had to put a tighter kinda s curve in it to get them to meet up. I ran a couple of cars over it and it seemed fine but i want to make sure in the early stages.

I need a little info about Bachmanns e-z command dcc system. My understanding of this system is it will run more than one loco right out of the box, not sure how many but more than one......the local hobby shop told me that it will run only one loco out of the box and if i want to run more than one i will need to purchase a booster which runs about 300 bucks......is this the case?