do the shay locomotives come with sound or do they come with sound. how many cars can a shay pull?
1st Question: The bachamann shays come with or without sound. $424 MSRP for one with sound & DCC, $318 MSRP for one without sound & w/o DCC.
2nd Question: It depends on if your cars are all NMRA weighted, if they have free rolling trucks, and the grade on your layout.
right now micro mark dcc ready 79.95
dcc with sound 220.95
you can pay more if you like
lex
I run a total of 5 Bachmann HO Shays on my layout. One is sound equipped.
Any one of them will haul a string of 6 loaded Rivarossi log cars up a 4% grade with little effort. Consist 2 of them, and they are almost unstoppable.
As a side note, and I don't want to be sounding like a Bachmann advetisement here, the sound equipped Shay is by far THE BEST out of the box locomotive I've seen yet. It starts off smoothly on speed step 1 and the sound is wonderful. On speed step 5, this Shay takes a little better than 1/2 hour to travel my mainline.
Sid