IIRC this sytem essentially

IIRC this sytem essentially broke up the railroad into multiple small blocks. The effect was that of progressive cab control with dozens (on a SMALL layout) of individual blocks. From what I can remember, it was assisted by some electronics that allowed the blocks to be swapped in and out of the path of the locomotive somewhat (but not completely) automatically.

It had the misfortune of coming out at just about the time DCC did, and suffered the same fate as many single-source control systems have. There just weren't enough people that took it seriously to keep it in production.

A local N modular scale club I was with at the time had a couple of strong advocates of the system in it, but the other members were unwilling to spend money on a system that would only be usable on the club layout and would require setting things up in exactly the same configuration each time.

As I remember, it was also at least as expensive as the entry level DCC systems of the time, even including engine decoders. The club layout would have required at least 3 or 4 of these systems to operate in the manner they wanted, and the same operations with even more granular control could be accomplished with a single DCC system.

The last I heard, they were one of the few clubs still running analog DC control in their area, even after all these years... largely because of two members that refused to go to DCC. (They never DID buy the MZL system...) The club has been getting smaller over the years, too - it's about half the size it was when they were going through this.

BTW...  according to http://www.dccwiki.com/DCC_History#MZL Ravenscroft was also the designer of the system.