DC/DCC

[rrinker]

Most of that changing of the recommendations is about as bogus as a $3 bill. It's amazing how many 'experts' pop up overnight saying no, don't do it this way, do it that way. One of them, conveniently, is a vendor who prefers systems that don't do the address 00 thing, and sells devices to divide the layout into multiple sections. There's an awful lot of mythology out there about what does and doesn't work, much of it completely unrelated to the type of control system being used. If you have just one set of feeders and lots of loose rail joiners, DC locos won't run very well either. But this seems to get translated into "DCC needs lots of feeders to work". Not so.
I also don't see why people are having so much trouble with keeping their track clean. I NEVER clean mine, except after painting the rails, no matter how good you are, some gets on the tops and needs to be cleaned off. My non-sound locos don;t have flickering lights because they lose contact due to dirty track adn wheels, and the two sound locos I do have don;t go through all that startup stuff over and over, they just creep along as slow as I want. Of course, they don;t happen to use that brenad of sound decoder which stupidly goes through the entire startup sequence every time it loses power, either. Nor would I particualrly use that brand were I to install sound in any of my other locos.
You can make it complicated by listening to too many 'experts' before installing anything, or you can just go out and buy a system and hook it up per the included instructions and have fun running trains.

--Randy