Model Railway Forum

Know it's a tall order, will pay up to £100.

Regrettably with that budget you’ll probably only get an Hornby Select. They are quite limited in function. You may get lucky with an Elite but even on eBay they are slightly over your budget.
Personally, I would save a bit longer and look at the Prodigy or Powercab options.

Hi

At that £100 new price you're really looking at mainly PC operation. So options are:-
Hornby new eLink available sub £80.00
SPROG II (£50.00) or the more powerful SPROG III (£65.00) but both need a suitable power supply as an extra SPROG sell these at £10 or £20 respectively. https://www.sprog-dcc.co.uk/
For hand held you should be able to obtain a Roco Multimaus DCC system removed from train sets for around £90.00 to £110 all in. Unsure if this one in the example is complete or needs additional items? I think the latter - Best to ask before buying https://www.dccconcepts.com/product/roc ... ol-system/
Otherwise its a secondhand item and here you would need to keep an eye on ebay perhaps? Example.. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Fleischmann- ... SwWl5dqeSC

I started off with the Roco Multimaus system and paid about £80. It's not a bad system, bit quirky with some point motors and the manual isn't always that simple to understand, or was I too simple for the manual. One of the two But it does what it needs to.

You could go the DCC++ route on an Arduino for about £15 for a clone Arduino UNO and motor shield, you will need to connect it to a PC or Laptop to run it but you can use your smart phone as a handset using an App

If you find a cheap eLink (£20-30) don’t forget to factor in the cost of a licence for Railmaster as that is the only way you can use it. Beware buying a second hand licence as they are not transferable to a new user. Make sure the key-code has not been used.