I see on the big online auction/sale site that some vendors are taking the N scale 4-6-0 that comes with the "Whistle-Stop Special" train set and selling it separately as a DCC and sound equipped loco. Typically for around $170 and "no retail packaging". They must figure they can sell the parts of the set for more than the whole.  Does anyone have one of these and do you know if it is a true Soundtraxx Econami sound decoder or the earlier more stripped-down Sound Value Soundtraxx decoder?  There is not enough product information for me to tell, although I suspect it is not the Econami.   There is one reviewer video posted I've seen and the whistle sounds different from the ones on my 2-8-0 Econami equipped Consolidation.

I have a new 2-8-0 with Econami DCC/sound, the headlight initially was so dim you had to have a dark room to be surel the light was on. I replaced the LED with a larger, warm white surface mount LED and replaced the light tube and lens with a larger fiber optic strand and home made lens. That made things better but barely acceptable.  Recently I swapped tenders and decoders with a 4-6-0 that I had fitted with an ESU Loksound V5. That 4-6-0 initially had a dim amber LED out of the box with it's OEM Bachmann non-sound DCC decoder which I replaced with the ESU. I changed the LED to a warm white and it was very bright with the ESU decoder.

I did this decoder exchange as the 2-8-0 Connie is a much better model that deserves a better decoder than an Econami. Out of all 16 Econami whistles, only one was not grating/jarring to my ears and the slow speed response was OK but not great.

To my surprise, the tender/decoder "swap" (really not a swap, a lot of black wire identification, desoldering and resoldering) resulted in an extremely bright headlight on the 2-8-0, so much so that I had to turn down the intensity using programming. 

OTOH, the tender with the Soundtraxx/Econami and Bachmann electronic board that came with the 2-8-0 and now was grafted on the 4-6-0 caused the formerly bright headlight to go very dim, as bad as it was out of the box. 

So it would appear that the PC board to which Bachmann's DCC decoders and Econami decoders are the culprit. Someone has decided that dim headlights are a good thing apparently, or more likely, no thought at all was given and somewhere on that board are very high resistance values in the lighting circuit for no good reason.

Not a problem if you are ripping out the whole shebang including the stock speaker to put in an ESU or other high quality sound decoder but disappointing otherwise. Paying a premium price for a downgraded Soundtraxx decoder also gets you very dim lighting to boot.   

I don't know if the 2-8-0 has a coreless motor like the 4-6-0 but it runs much more smoothly with the Loksound than with the Econami. And the 4-6-0 runs justs as well with the Econami as it did with the Loksound, probably because of that coreless motor.

I am disappointed with the business model that Bachmann (and BLI also) has chosen, ie. you get their product only with DCC/sound and it is not a high-end sound decoder but you do pay a high-end price for it. I imagine that 95%+ of N scalers are happy enough so there is no pressure to change this practice.

I have an N scale 2-8-0 Consolidation with Soundtraxx Econami bought earlier this year before all this pandemic business. Haven't run it for a few months and recently fired it up on a section of a new layout I'm building. I am noticing that it makes a definite coffee-grinder mechanism noise which, while not really loud, can still be heard above the sound effects.  It starts at speed step 1 and if anything gets less noisy as the speed increases but maybe that's just my imagination. 

I am fairly new to steam and have two Bachmann ten wheelers with DCC (one with ESU Loksound which I installed), a 2-10-2 with Loksound I also installed and a BLI Mike with their factory DCC/sound.  I mean all have some minor issues, but not this type of grinding sound. Is this to be expected for this particular engine?  I think I can live with it just comes with the design. I am used to silent Kato diesel mechanisms!

Also notice that with some of the Bachmann locos, there will be pilot truck or tender truck wheels that may not be in precise gauge (always narrow) and for my homemade turnouts built using Fast Tracks templates and to NMRA standards, even a slight narrowness of gauge can cause binding through the frog area which are built tight to spec. I widened the pilot wheel gauge of the Connie to exact NMRA spec and cured a slight hop through one of my curved turnouts. Fortunately, the drivers have been OK.

Am I the only one or does the N scale 2-8-0 with Soundtraxx Econami have an extremely dim headlight? Mine is so dim you can barely tell it is on and it is orange in color. My older 2-10-2 has a similar headlight design but it is MUCH brighter and golden white!

Can Bachmann explain why the change in design for a newer release engine that has resulted in such a poor result?

I removed the boiler shell and tender shell, found a tiny chip on the front PC board not very close to the light gathering pipe that goes out through the boiler front to the headlight housing.  I removed it and attached magnet wire to the leads and glued a larger golden white LED to the front of the boiler casting.  I checked the tender's PC board and found two 220,000 ohm resistors on the light circuit--that is really strange as most LEDs use around 1000-10000 ohms.  I removed those and replaced them with a pair of 1500 ohm SMD resistors. Now the headlight is much brighter and a more appropriate color. But still not right, the light tube seems to be very thin and ends too far from the face of the light.  So I'm still not happy and it was a lot of finicky work that shouldn't have been needed.

BTW I also improved the speaker response by filling in the large opening in the front of the tender with black styrene and closing the hole where the engine wires enter the tender with a piece of soft black foam cut from the piece that came with the engine in the cab as it was shipped in the box.  This seems to have sealed up the enclosure enough to make the sound louder and richer.