Yeah, apparently the whole controlling the train by the voltage¹ and polarity of the electricity in the rails has been replaced with little digital chips in the locomotives that let you control each locomotive independently and not have to have them in separate zones on the layout. I have a bunch of stuff in the basement from when I was thinking of getting back into the hobby around 2001 and then, well, 2001 happened and put that all on hold. Maybe sometime in the future or maybe I’ll just sell it all off.
> Yeah, apparently the whole controlling the train by the voltage¹ and polarity of the electricity in the rails has been replaced with little digital chips in the locomotives that let you control each locomotive independently and not have to have them in separate zones on the layout.
Can I reuse the tracks (not the locomotives, just the track) from my Marklin HO and switch to digital trains? Sounds cool.
Assuming you have the yellowish, metal tracks (M-Track) it should work more or less.
Electrically the tracks with the connectors for power might have capacitors for radio interference reasons, they're unnecessary for and cause problems with the digital signals.
With regards to the wheel-track geometry, Märklin hasn't changed that much and most modern rolling stock compatible with the "Märklin system" (commonly referred to as "3L"/"AC") should work on M-track. Only the small "industrial radius" tracks might be a bit problematic in general and longer cars can hit turnout signals (mostly a problem with long passenger cars that aren't shortened to 1/100 or 1/93.5 scale).
Some manufacturers have created "universal" wheelsets, those might be prone to derailments.
Digital trains need clean rails for proper operation, m-track is more vulnerable to rust and really needs proper rust removal, especially after not being used for a while.|
AFAIK it's not that rare to use m-track for storage yards and "non-visible" track rather than throwing it away.
Yep. And you can simplify your wiring since you only need to put in insulators where there would be a potential short (e.g., a Y loop) and not split the layout into zones for operation.
Also adding the chip to a locomotive is a pretty simple thing so you can retrofit older locomotives (it’s also possible to mix non-digital locomotives with digital locomotives).
GP mentioned Märklin H0, so Y-Loops aren't a Problem anyway because both wheels have the same potential, it's a modified 3rail system with a bunch of studs in the middle as a 3rd rail.
There are a handful of people I recognize, most because they’re people I knew from outside HN (and one because he has the same last name as someone I went to high school with and lives local to me and I always wonder if they’re related but I’ve never asked). But yes, the de-emphasis on user names is, I think, a good thing since it ends up being interacting with content rather than personality.
I remember reading an ad in one of the 90s PC magazines that attributed the dongle to an inventor named “Don Gull.” I was fortunate enough to never have to use a hardware dongle, but I remember hearing about their persistence into the twenty-first century. I would imagine that most of them were as ridiculously simple as this one was.
Maybe. Go and ask them. Maybe they are truly awful people, maybe they are old or ill, or disabled. Go and talk to them, then start labelling them x and y. See? No one got the idea. All “you” want is that nobody bothers “you”. But thinking from the perspective of others? No, that’s too difficult. The best realisation I had in life was that I am pissing others off for some reasons, as they piss me off for some other reasons. Unfortunately the majority of the lovely “society” doesn’t have that realisation.
Indeed, although C kind of felt second-class on VMS since the language has a lot of Unixisms embedded in the standard library and, to a lesser extent, the language itself.
Being able to define command line interfaces using cld files on VMS was really wonderful and you got things like abbreviations of options (and commands) to their shortest unique initial string was quite nice (so, for example, the directory command could be named as such but everybody just typed dir).
Very familiar with it. Ran it in production for a major gambling company in my country for years. The stability was okay (no better than say Solaris) but the ergonomics for administrators and developers was absolutely horrid.
The Alpha though? It's a shame DEC couldn't push it hard enough to prevent x86_64 from happening.
Even 7 zeros is pretty much you can do what you want anytime you want. Ten million dollars sitting in a bank account earning 3% is 25k a month and nobody with those kinds of assets is leaving them in a bank account earning 3%.
3% is considered a "safe withdrawal rate" for stock investments, not so much if you have the money just sitting in a bank account, but you're right nevertheless. You can do whatever you want with that kind of money.
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/22/nx-s1-5511707/ozempic-zepboun...
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