About us - the history of our company

Modellbahn Digital Peter Stärz was founded as a company on 1st December in 2003.

Motivation

I've been loving occupying myself with model railways since I was a child. My first railway system was assembled before christmas and dismantled when the holidays were over. I grew older and just playing during christmas became too boring for me, so I started to develop some first railway systems with relays to supervise the corresponding sections of line.

That undoubtedly was one step forward, but the sudden driving off and braking of the trains on their sections never satisfied me.

Analogue electronic circuits were set up, and a softer starting and braking of the locomotives and wagons could then be realized. Thereby I quickly recognized that trains with or without its centrifugal mass react in a different way to the relays.

Despite a lot of improvements done to optimize the analogue circuits, it remained impossible to have stopped all the trains notwithstanding their individual driving properties on approximately the same point.

The years passed by and aroused my interest in digital technology. Why shouldn't it be possible that every single train stopps at one precise point, especially in the railway station area?

I tried to find and contact specialist shops in and around Dresden to get more information on digital railways in general and in particular. Most sources of information proved itself as unilateral and scanty. Even specialist literature contained few explanations. Especially the Selectrix-System was concerned by this lack of information.

This was acknowledged by numerous discussions I had with different experts, who shared my opinion of Selectrix as the only model railway system to meet my requirements.

Beyond that I learned by experience that one needs a lot of expert's help and advice before making a decision for one digital system. Such a consultation is done best by use of a concrete example, and so my vision of setting up a demonstration model railway arose also in the view to support the distribution of the Selectrix System.

It's our goal to bring the advantages of Selectrix home to the customer and to sell the system in a long-term efficient way.

Progressive development

We initially started with the marketing of train decoders of Doehler&Haass.

Due to our close cooperation with Doehler&Haass we could expand our product range in the beginning of 2005 to Selectrix registration and control modules and were thus able to add the kits of accessory deocder WDMiba and occupancy detector BMMiba to our product line.

Over the following years our company philosophy of supporting model railway collectors and enthusiasts with fitting module kits has been established, and we regularly offer new products to fulfil each and every wish our customers express.

Motivated by many inquiries, in winter 2007/2008 we released the Occupancy Detector for DCC and Occupancy Detector for Motorola, both to report in the SX-Bus.

Finally in September 2009 we could complete our product assortment by releasing the , the first central unit obtainable on the market as a kit. From that moment on, we may acknowledge ourself to be supplier of a complete system for model railways controlling in Germany.

Equiped with that, for the first time we attended the 2. Lausitzmodellbau in Senftenberg as an exhibitor together with demonstration layout and since then try to regularly present ourselfs in public to have direct contact with our customers.

That was a real milestone for our work done so far, and we are continuously getting further to develop new products helping to optimize all types of model railway systems. In 2010 for instance the Servo Decoder was developed. Our product range is also subject to regular updates, and thus already the third version of the Occupancy Decoder BMMiba has been released.

In the winter of 2011/2012 the support of DCC and Selectrix-2 has been realised in our new Digital Central Unit ZS2 and also the accompanying control modules Control Panel SPF-PIC and Loco Controller DHR-PIC have been updated to allow DCC users to profit from the benefits of the SX bus.

The, in 2012 released, Stärz Decoder Programmer V2 offers the functionality to programme loco decoders via computer directly without any third party software, making the (Mainboard of the Digital Central Unit ZS2 resp.) even without the Displayboard a powerful tool expressing all its capabilities.