hi, i have a CS2 which i normally use for my 3 rail marklin layout with mixture of delta and mf locos.

Now i also have a growing layout of DC 2 rail that i would like to convert to digital. i was thinking of installing digitrax decoders and get a digitrax dcc controller, but instead can i use my CS2 to control the 2 rail locos with digitrax controllers.? if so how i wire up the CS2?

thank you very much!
david

You take the two wires from your layout feeder track , put a plug on them and plug it into the CS2 track connector socket

You can use CS2 with mfx and DCC protocol on the two rail,if you have Märklins decoder that support mfx too and not only DCC.
It depends if your CS2 has been set with those protocols.
Yes you can also use Digitrax decoder with the CS2 since Märklins system do also accept DCC.
Not sure if Digitrax controller can been connect with the CS2?
Will this not happens digital interference?

There is no difference on 3-rail vs. 2-rail when it comes to running digitally. Look at it this way: Pretend like the left rail on a Märklin track isn't there. What do you have left? The center rail and a right rail. What does that make? 2-rail!

It is the same thing. All locos today utilize the same technology one way or the other. The only difference is how the power comes into the locomotive: Pickup shoe or 2-rail power pickup.

I have a CS2. It runs both my 2-rail and 3-rail loop on the layout. Just don't put your Märklin wagons on your 2-rail loop.

As Peter said, just connect the wires and off you go. Easy!

:D right, keep the markin locs and wagons away from 2 rail :)

ok great i'll give it a try. thank you very much for the insights!

david

All works well, but i had to set the cs2 to dcc only mode (not auto) to be able to access cv and change address. Not a big deal!

That shouldn't be needed. I run Märklin-Motorola and Mfx decoders in parallel to DCC decoders on which I can configure CV settings using CS2.


I have set the DCC addresses to >300 using CS2. There are postings on the net that some (older) multi-protocol decoders could be "confused" if the address is set within the Märklin protocol range, something I also experienced. I set the address in the main settings window, not the CV setting window. I failed to set address >300 only on one DCC enabled decoder.

DCC addressing is slightly wierd in that it has two modes - short addressing and long addressing.

Short addressing uses 1 to 127 - but some controllers can only use 1 to 99 for short addresses. 0 is a reserved address.

Long addresses are 0 to 9999 (technically it can be up to something like 10237). Some controllers will accept long addresses of 100+, and others will accept only 128+. This is because they use this as a way of demarcation when selecting an address as short or long, but that is not a discussion we need to go into here.

A long address takes two 8 bit CVs to set up the value of the address, and then there is another CV has to have a bit set so that the decoder responds to long addresses instead of short addresses - a decoder can have both a long address and a short address, and they can be different. Now some controllers will automagically do the calculation of the values to go into the CV registers for the long address, as well as set the 'long address enable' bit in the other CV when asked to program a long address. It sounds like the CS2 does this (I don't have the items to try it out). It is always better to use such functionality when programming CVs as it saves a lot of mistakes, and programs the registers in the correct order (e.g. it is technically possible to program one half of the long address, program the long address enable bit, then have an error programming the other half of the long address, and now you don't know what the long address is set to, which can be confusing).