Design of Urban Rail Transit Layouts for Training, Demonstrating, and Planning Using DCC Systems

This article makes a description on the designing of the urban rail transit layouts using DCC systems. To meet the needs of building a reliable, feature-rich, interface opened, and maintainable urban rail transit layouts for training, demonstrating, and planning. Using standard and modified DCC (digital command control, a popular international standard originally designed for model train control) components and specially designed peripheral hardware to control the trains, turnouts, signal lights, PA systems, and other model subsystems like in a real rail transit system, using LAN to make the operation control system like ATS, ATO, using Wi-Fi camera inside the model locomotive to simulates the train engineer’s view, using net cameras as CCTV system, and so on. The results shows the new layout system can simulates most functions of the subsystems of a real urban rail transit system like train scheduling, train routing, train automatic and manual operating, signaling logic, etc. Simultaneously, the system is stable, flexible, scalable, and easy to maintain. And hoping this system can be used in future as an open interfaced research platform for different kinds of needs like network train operation organization, intelligent train scheduling, fault drill and emergency plan settings, and so on.