What is Railroad Automation?
Railroad Automation started out in 2002 as a project I gave myself to quickly get up to speed on what was, at the time, Microsoft’s new .NET platform. Combine that with my love for DCC (Digital Command Control) model railroads and the application grew to become a full featured toy box for model railroads based on Digitrax’s Loconet network. Over the years as the .NET feature set evolved, I have been able to add many cool features to the application both as a learning tool and because it made the application that much more fun to operate.
I found that other model railroad DCC solutions available suffered from one or more of these problems which I wished to improve upon: un-user friendly, antiquated, and sometimes downright ugly UIs, closed and not componentized, stiff and un-programmable. My goal was to provide prototypical model railroad command and control utilizing modern technologies and providing a great deal of flexibility for third party developers or tinkerers. The latter was achieved by breaking the application into distinct layers so consumers can choose the level of flexibility vs. usability they require.
Downloads and Resources
The binaries can either be installed through a standard Windows installation or a
ClickOnce deployment.
If you don't wish to develop againt the API, and your system supports it, the ClickOnce deployment is the simpler and prefered choice.
Please send bugs or requests to
Perecli@dslextreme.com.
Latest Stable Release (4/8/09 - Build v1.1.26):
Launch - ClickOnce application deployment
Download - Standard .MSI application and libraries installer.
View - Railroad Automation class library documentation.
Download - VS2008 WinForms sample project demoing basic usage of the LoconetService class.
Download - VS2008 WinForms sample project demoing basic usage of the CtcService class.
Download - VB6 code example showing basic usage of the LoconetService class through CCW (COM Callable Wrapper).
Alpha Build of Upcoming v2.0 for WPF:
Launch - ClickOnce application deployment of work in progress
View - Railroad Automation class library documentation with WPF support.
Other References:
Download - Free copy of Visual Studio 2008 Express.
Loconet Checker - Application built on top of this Loconet API for management, configuration, and monitoring your Digitrax devices. This is a great utility, written by Stefan Trachsler.