[CMOTD]

Yes, timing hardware is home made  - simple light bridge and photo sensors set into track. Run through parallel port on ancient laptop running Windows XP which is never connected to the internet. 

RC version is also ancient 1.11.5 I think. I am not alone, loads of people use similar set ups. An RMS uses a tiny fraction of a computer's resources so a state of the art one is not necessary.

I installed this more than ten years ago and work on the basis " if it ain't broke why fix it?"  Always happy to look at other systems though to see if improvements are available.