Zimo call it "the RAILCOM affair"...
8 years now that Railcom norms have been edited, completed, re-edited...and not any interesting Apps yet...
Zimo - quite serious partner in digital - has left the Railcom working group . They return back to the developpment of their own bidirectionnal system with better Applications : "....not just for train numbers and route settings...." ( allusion to the poor applications of Railcom )
Here is another newsletter from Zimo in which they give more details, scroll down page 8 untill the tittle "The Railcom affair":

http://www.zimo.at/web20...ter%202011%20Juli_EN.pdf

On their official bulletin , Zimo stays cool...
Well, it could be a serious problem, according some rumours, to work efficiently with Block systems the Railcom norm is "sufferring" from technical lacks & should be deeply revised...

All systems are lacking communication problems.
As Dave said, if everyone develops their own system we are left out in the cold.
It took me several years to make up my mind which system I'll go for and this doesn't mean I've made the right decision.
At least the system I've gone for is an open protocol.
Marklins original digital system, in my mind was a trouble free system and worked fine and will be for many more years.
RailcomPlus, what I've heard from experts isn't the best and for Zimo to go on its own is again a step forward.
What concerned me with Zimo for a long time is their bugs in their components and it looks to me on the surface they've gone to quick forward without consolidating where they are going to.
All manufacturers had their upgrades with digital command stations and most of them are not compatible anymore.
What I can't understand is why we have only 4 Aux functions available as most of the gadgets we need to activate is lighting and today, Led's is the way to go.
If I can use 10 carriages with 12 led's each over Aux 1 & Aux 2, have the loco running and headlights, I'm sure we can have more Auxillary functions.
Zimo was also a contender because of their innovative concepts but in the end I've decided against it.

Unless Marklin can come up with something completely new, I can't see me ever going back to buy their digital components.

John