About Railstars

Railstars began with the thought that I could create a digital command and control system for my own model railroad. Motivated by the high cost of commercially available products, their general level of user-hostility, and a desire to learn about new things, I decided to set out to make my own system from scratch. Railstars began as a personal project, but has now grown to become the newest entrant into the world of model railroading controls. Our goal is to craft the best and easiest to use tools for operating your model railroad.

Railstars’s controls interact with each other and with the layout in two distinct ways. Interaction with your trains is accomplished via the industry-standard NMRA Digital Command Control (DCC) protocol (see right). Interaction with other layout components (turnouts, signals and indicators, visual and sound FX) and with you (via hand-held cabs, control panels, etc.) is accomplished via the powerful and flexible NMRAnet protocol.

DCC is a protocol for communicating commands to model trains that is backwards compatible with long-standing practices for analog train control. Analog model trains use the two rails as conductors connecting an analog voltage source (the throttle) to a DC motor mounted inside the train. Thus, trains are controlled by putting a voltage on the rails: the greater the voltage, the faster the train moves. DCC, in contrast, uses the rails as a kind of low-bandwidth packetized network connecting a so-called digital command station to tiny computers, called decoders, mounted inside the trains. The digital command station generates a square wave signal that can be rectified to provide power, and that communicates instructions to specific decoders. In this way, multiple trains can be run independently on the same track, and the user is given unprecendented fine-grained control over auxilliary functions as headlights, warning lights, smoke generators, and even sound effects mounted within the model train.