How much can we justify spending?

[Lester Perry]

I do have DCC but was kind of pushed into it. I had developed what I called PCC. Poor mans Command Control, I put latching reed switches in all of my locomotives. By waving a magnet over the cab of a diesel or the coal in the tender of steam locomotive I could turn it off or on. The headlight would turn off or on with the motor. I used the old bridge rectifier system to power 1.5 volt lights which makes them come with low voltage and come on very bright. My layout was 4 blocks WB, EB main line, Yard & J&M short line. It was powered with 4 power supply's, 2 MRC walkaround and 2 regular power packs. I could have 10 locomotives in the yard and run my SW 1200 switching all around them. The I purchased a BLI C&O T1 with sound that would run on DC. It had momentum programed in it and it wouldn't go through a crossover because every time it had a momentary break in the power the momentum would start over which means it had to start at 0 again. I called the manufacturer, tey said it was easy to fix just program the momentum out. Wait a minute how do I do that? I started looking at DCC decided MRC seemed easiest to use. Then spotted a typo in an ad in MRR magazine. Someone had it on sale for $170.00 normally it was $350.00. I am not stupid so I called them. Now I have DCC I just added it to my layout as another power supply. That was about 12 years ago. I have slowly changed all of my steam to DCC getting decoders for as little as $10.00 some do have sound, two have expensive sound. The BLI is the only one bought with sound and it doesn't need it but it forced me to buy DCC. All that to say, yes I have DCC with some sound. Not because I really wanted to it just happened.