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  • Australian Model Railway Magazine

    Train Automation

    Sep 18, 2018 12 minutes
    Photos by the author.

    This is the third in a series of articles on the use of a computer to assist in designing, simulating and automating your model train layout. Although some readers may wish to follow this sequence, the use of a computer to design or even simulate a layout is not a pre-requisite for model train computer automation. You can automate an existing layout or incorporate it as part of building or renovating a layout. In this article, I will cover issues such as explaining what train automation is, how it is done and why you may want to do it.

    This article focusses on the train automation software called TrainController. This is Windows software, part of a suite of programs under the Railroad & Co. brand developed by Friewald Software, a German based company. There are several other train automation products available, including:

    • CTI Electronics Train Brain. This software will control DCC trains and accessories, such as turnouts, from a screen-based panel and on-screen throttles. Although DCC trains can be controlled ‘out of the box’, most other functions require some programming via the built-in programming language. I noticed that Brendan Jansen in his article about his layout, Casino, in AMRM Issue 329 (April 2018) made reference to using this software.

    • . The JMRI project builds tools for model railway computer control based on the open source concept. It is built in Java so it will run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux machines and supports a very wide range of DCC hardware systems. It is free, but a small donation to help defray the costs of keeping the project going is always appreciated by the developers. It has a very active world-wide users’ group which is constantly contributing to the further development of the various JMRI products. One product, Decoder Pro, is a tool used by many model railway enthusiasts, even if they don’t use the other tools to automate their layout. Instead of wrangling with complicated combinations of bit patterns to program decoder CVs,

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