I recently stumbled across the Java Model Railroad Interface, an cool open source project, although I found it for reasons totally unrelated to the ones that apparently make it relatively famous right now.

Just to get that part out of the way, this page provides a description of an interesting legal battle ongoing between one of the JMRI people and a third party. The third party is claimed to have taken portions of JMRI’s GPL content, patented it, registered a domain name for it, and incorporated it into another product without permission. Pretty bold! It’s considered to be an important case for OSS in general right now. So far, the legal appeals process seems to be siding with JMRI.

Anyway, I found JMRI because, although I’ve been away from the model railroading hobby for many years, I was wondering if exactly this sort of thing existed. Namely, “free” software that allows commodity PC-like hardware to control model trains. And I now know the answer to be Yes.

A conversation with my father, who is a considerably more hard core model railroader than I, made me wonder what the uptake of this technology is likely to be, though. It’s an interesting question, I think, for a number of reasons.

The first reason is that model railroaders have a history of striving to simulate realistic railroad operations on their models. Depending on the era being modelled, computer based control, along with signalling and transponding, are the reality. This is especially true if a modern intermodal shipping operation is being modelled.

For example, these days, any piece of mobile industrial equipment above a certain cost tends to have a GPS locator attached. That’s cool technology, but cost-prohibitive to replicate on a scale model. And yet, with a PC (or MAC, or anything with a network or USB stack and JRT) in tandem with digital command and control (DCC), modelling GPS is actually pretty easy.

Another reason that uptake of computer-based control will be interesting pertains to the evolution of model railroading as a hobby. There’s a different sort of skill required to setup a model railroad versus hooking into a PC. The typical hobbyist won’t have the skills to tackle the latter, although those skills can be acquired just like anything else. On the other hand, newcomers to the hobby are more and more likely to be computer savvy, and possibly looking for a non-work related outlet for those skills.

All of this aside, the argument can certainly be made that computer-based control is overkill for anything smaller than a large club layout (that is, unless simulation of modern shipping technologies is the primary goal). Plus, a typical large model railroading club is likely to have at least one person with deep computer skills, who can then contribute those skills not only to the club layout, but to the layouts of the other individual members as well.

From my perspective, the biggest barrier to adoption of computer-based control is that DCC is a prerequisite, and it’s still cost prohibitive. That is, even though software such as JMRI is compelling and free, and virtually everyone has a computer that could run it, it does you no good unless a DCC command station is deployed. A typical unit, the Digitrax DCS100, is almost $300 retail, and other lesser pieces of equipment are required as well before the functionality offered by the computer hookup becomes interesting.

I haven’t been able to track down a software implementation of DCC – does one exist? I think that’s the future.

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