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 has evolved, I have been able to add many interesting 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 usability vs. flexibility they require.
Downloads and Resources
Railroad Automation v2.0 is now complete. The UI has been completely rewritten in
WPF and the API now supports both Win Forms and WPF.
I recommend using the new version especially if starting a new layout as the file format is not compatible with v1.x.
Please send bugs or requests to
Perecli@dslextreme.com.
Build v2.0.0.166 - Released 02/03/10
Launch - Railroad Automation
ClickOnce deployment.
Download - Railroad Automation sample layout file.
View - Railroad Automation class library documentation.
Download - Railroad Automation standalone DLL library and VS2008 sample projects. (for developers)
Build v1.1.26 (depricated)
Download - Railroad Automation standard .MSI installer.
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.