I've been a bit of a luddite as regards the whole DCC thing and its impact on model railways. To be honest I'd held off in the hope that by now the technology would be so cheap as to not even be an issue, but even now you are still looking at anything from £15 - £25 per loco for a reliable decent DCC chip - and don't even get me started about DCC sound, at around £110 a pop for each loco I'd have to have a bloody good lottery win to sound chip all mine.
Having said all that though, I felt the time had come to start making some inroads into doing at least something with the locomotives that I'd got and was intent on keeping (and eventually running) for Cradley Bridge. I'd got a fair few loco's that were DCC ready and needed either 8pin or 21pin DCC chips. I've only ever purchased 4 items that were already DCC'd and those only because I'd got them at a good price - 2 of those were fitted with Sound Chips; more on that later.
After having a bit of a dabble recently with a few 8 pin DCC chips from various manufacturers, I think the one I was most pleased with and seemed to be the most controllable/tweakable was the standard Lenz 10231-01 chip. As I said before, I do have a quite a few locomotives (several of each class of diesel) and whilst I would love to sound chip them all, in reality not only would it be amazingly expensive but also I'm not sure if the novelty would wear off or if technology will change again - so for the time being the plan will be to have one of each type represented with DCC sound, the rest will have to make do with a standard chip for now. Personally, as long as they are controllable, have lights and have great slow running capabilities, I'm a happy bunny. To me the sound (well certainly from a couple of manufacturers) is just the icing on the cake, but to me at the moment its just way too costly.
Anyways, back to these Lenz chips - after sourcing a cheap supplier of them online, I decided to have a go at doing them in batches, so this little lot has just arrived in the post. The technical blurb that comes with it says that its a back EMF, 3 function, 1 amp output protected decoder, with an 8 pin plug and Railcom - sounds good enough for me!
As for how all this technology is going to be controlled - thanks to a bit of internet research, some hands on experience and advice from a friend who's got one (cheers Red) I eventually went for the NCE powercab system. Not as expensive, comprehensive as some systems out there, but more than enough for what I want at the moment and probably will do for quite a while... famous last words!!
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