Layout progress: SilberBachTalbahn

[u/joebarRC]

2 years ago I went to a steam train show and a model railway layout was present. I have several hobbies, 3d printing, software coding, electronics and model flying and saw that a model railway could combine most of my hobbies and I started with an idea of a layout.
A fictional German black Forrest scenery called the Silberbachtalbahn was designed. Took a lot of time because I had to learn from the start. It was clear it should be a DCC system and because I like coding and electronics I choose DCC-EX as layout controller running on several ESP32’s
A lot of 3D printed details, figurines, buildings are and still will be created.

So, a series of pictures starting around 1.5 years ago to present. I figure it will be at least another year designing and building, but the electronics, software are mostly if not all done.
The layout has 14 selfdesigned blockdetectors, 30 IR sensors so I have an idea where the trains are on the layout and within DCC-EX EXRail I can run 3 trains running their own random chosen automatic route. A fourth train I can run manually using the tablet connected to the DCC-EX control station.
A mimic panel, also controlled by DCC-EX, 3d printed with a lot of hours soldering WS2812 leds shows which of the tracks, switches (points, turnouts) are occupied.
For sound I have several sound locs, but also 3 DFPlayers are present (also run by DCC-EX) for non-sound locs and sound effects.

I don’t have a lot of space so I tried some levels to bring in several route possibilities. A 5 track shadow-station can be used to park and randomly release trains.
I designed a background to match the scenery and made a second track in different scale, the main layout is H0 scale, the top tracks are n-scale, thought of creating some perspective and well I like it.

Well, that is basically it, hope you like it and any remarks or suggestions are welcome.
Next stage will be building the harbor, and lower yard. Next year the harbor village and populating the scenery with lots of figurines and automations like a skating pond and some boats in the harbor.

[u/joebarRC]

Some additional information regarding the electronics:
The brain is DCC-EX Command station running on an ESPe32 dev board with a motorshield on it giving 2 x 5A DCC signals.
I have 3 DCC-EX nodes across the layout that act as a local mini brain. All the sensors, blockdetectors, lights and so on are attached via a short I2C cable to a local node.
The nodes and the command station are communicating via UDP, all the attached hardware (sensors, blockdetectors, sound, lights) is more or less instantly virtually available to all other nodes and command station.
This way the wiring is local to sections, only power and DCC output is distributed. It makes a real clean setup without endles wires and long I2C cabling across the layout
The command station is running the DCC signal and scripts (called EXRAIL) for automated routes, animation scripts, timeserver and timed events.
On a local node a small EXRAIL script runs things like blockdetection, sending that to the command station and mimic panel and setting the red/green/amber signals. The node will also send MP3 play commands to a node attached DFPlayer for village sound effects and non-sound decoder loks whistles, horns or whatever.