Digitrax Track Status Light - Which Color Is It Anyway, And When?

The following is from BillyBob Experimenter on the Digitrax-Users groups.io forum and was written about a year ago.

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When address 0 is being used and it is "stopped", the lamp should look about the same as when address 0 is not being used.

When address 0 is being used and it is "moving forward", as the speed increases, the track status "gets more redish" (or gets more-greenish), with the most-redish (or most-greenish) when Address 0 is at a speed of 99.

When address 0 is being used and it is "moving reverse", as the speed increases, the track status "gets more-greenish" (or gets more-redish), with the most-greenish (or most-redish) when Address 0 is at a speed of 99.

When the "Address 0" feature is disabled, the track status lamp will show as "Amber".  And please note, I LocoNet devices do not support the "address 0" ("Analog loco") feature, and actually turn the command station's feature "off" if they see it turned on!  The OpSw which controls this is typically command station OpSw20; OpSw20=Thrown seems to allow Analog operation via address0;  opSw20=Closed seems to disallow Analog operation.

Be aware that the DCC track signal does not know which direction the loco is going!  If the loco is placed on the rails one way, the loco will run forward when the Track Status is more-greenish, and run reverse when the Track Status is more-redish .  But when put on the rails in the opposite direction, the loco will run reverse when the Track Status is more-greenish and run forward when the Track Status  lamp is more-redish! That's why I said "more-greenish (or more red-ish)" above...

And some DCC command stations display the Track Status in such a way as to be harder to determine the Analog usage.  This is because some command stations and boosters do not have a great "amount of greenishness" and "amount of redishness" for the effect of the "Address 0" speed.  In my experience, the DCS52, DCS210, DCS210+, DCS240, and DCS240+ command stations seem to have this "lower" variance.  This may affect DB210, DB220, DB220Opto boosters, too.

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