It has been 25 years since digital control of model railroads had its first world introduction. However, till today it remained a oneway street: A continuous stream of information flows from the command station to the decoders, and what comes back? Nothing !

It is time to change this; we have been discussing this need for a long time. Now we'll act:

The working group "RailCom":

The well known DCC companies LENZ, KUHN, TAMS and ZIMO joined forces to market and further develop the "bidirectional communication" based on the NMRA draft RP's 9.3.1, 9.3.2. "RailCom" is an efficient method of data transfer from the decoder to the command station and is the suitable completion of the DCC standard, the accepted world wide data protocol for the model railroad.

A new dimension for model railroads by

ZIMO is already well prepared for this new era: all (!) loco and accessory decoders since 2004 are equipped with the necessary hardware; all that's required is a software update, which as is generally known can be performed by the ZIMO customer without opening the loco as soon as the RailCom software becomes available.

This software as well as the RailCom detector (= bidirectional detector) for installation in ZIMO command stations already exists as a pre-production sample and has been shown in operation at various shows in 2005 on our "ARS" show layout. This layout will of course be present in Nuremberg again.