That railroad sounds like a very complicated and intense way to have fun. 

I have the opposite mentality.... Slow speed easy going steam powered 1940 era local freights on a loose schedule if any, maximum speed 15 scale mph, minimal paperwork if any.

I always think of the long gone Reader Railroad in southwest Arkansas... "The Possum Trot Line."😂

I'm retired.  My work life was too long and too involved, intense and responsible to do any other kind of railroading.

I never have to worry about breaking a coupler.😂😎

You need a DCC system that allows you to change cv's of the sound volumes.  EZ Command is not advanced enough to do this. 

In the attachment, See cv's 138-132.  And note that Cv 134, blower, and 136,steam release,  although not shown, are present too.

https://soundtraxx.com/content/Reference/Factory-Installed/Bachmann/SoundValue/bachmann_ho_284berkshire_sv.pdf

The sounds are not well balanced at default.  Set 128 master volume at 255, the maximum.  Then set 129, whistle, as loud as it can go without distorting.  Set the chuff, 131, as loud as it can go but still be covered up by the whistle.  Bell 130, the same.  Steam release, set at maximum 255.  Blower ok as is.

Try these and report.

There was a Bachmann spectrum 2-10–2 lettered for the Texas and Pacific on eBay a couple of days ago. Despite missing the pilot and looking like it took a nosedive off the layout, it went very fast.

I don't remember ever seeing this as a road name offered by Bachmann. Does anyone know if this actually was a stock road name way, way back in the Spectrum Jurassic?  If another one appears on eBay, I would know if it was a home repaint or not. I stay away from home repaints and decal jobs on eBay. You can't tell enough from the photos how bad the work probably is, but hardly anyone knows how to do decals right and you can always see the film edges.

Nevertheless, I am very interested in any Texas and Pacific steam locomotive that might appear on eBay, if it's not brass.

Who did you try to call? The Bachmann Service center?

I'm afraid that if you bought a train set without knowledge of what was or wasn't in it, you won't be able to trade it in for something else.  Train sets are not automobiles. Once you open the package, they have near- zero resale value at all.

Not much to go on, my friend . 

Look for a brand name stamped somewhere. Post photos if you knew how. Describe the locomotive. Steam or diesel. Wheel arrangement if you know how to figure it out. Describe each car. Describe scale, O, HO or whatever.  Measure and approximate height of a car. That will tell us enough to get an idea of which scale the trade is. Two rail or three rail track?

Photos for the best way to help you. But you can't just post them in this forum. You have to use a photo sharing app like Photobucket or something like that.

We want to help, but there's not enough right now to figure anything out

You could just connect your cars with drawbars too.  Or dummy scale couplers from the Jurassic before any kind of operating coupler had been invented, and no one switched at all. These would look really good, not break apart, but be separable for transporting the trains to, and from the exhibit

For what you are doing, the X2F couplers appear to be doing what you need.  You stated a good case for using them in the unusual environment in which you are running your trains.  In all my years of model railroading, though,  this is the first time I've ever seen an advocate for these early couplers over relatively prototypical appearing knuckle couplers.

101 scale miles per hour in a loop at an exhibition for children is different than a seriously operated model railroad with train make-up, interchange set-out and pick-up, customer switching, local freights working communities enroute, and at the final destination, breaking up the train, switching the interchange on that end, customer service, etc.  in this setting the X2F will never work well, virtually unable to uncouple without picking the cars up. I know, I used to have them and wildly celebrated the day the last ones came off the railroad.

If you merely running trains continuously, not uncoupling your cars, and can't see the couplers, you don't need realistic ones, you don't need ones that look good. But, as soon as you start moving cars independently of permanently, coupled trains, most modelers want to see a coupler that has at least some prototypical appearance.

I do have to say that sagging couplers can be corrected by more careful installation. A Kadee coupler gauge tells all.  But you have to use it. Some cars need more work than others or may need a more specialized coupler, Kadee makes dozens.  Plus, I can't imagine Kadee couplers breaking unless some kind of inordinately hard usage is happening.  If you are running 100 car trains at 101 scale miles an hour and stopping them dead within an inch, the weight of the sudden slack action probably will break couplers.  Imposition of astronomical toy train level demands on a fine scale product will probably cause failure.  Kadees aren't made with this in mind.

My last comment is about train speed. The clubs I've been in, when open to the public, all the children complained the trains are too slow, and aren't happy until they are running at rockets speed. We use that as a teachable moment to tell them that in the Railroad age, Trains did not run that fast, we are trying to present a relatively historically accurate  operation. Most of them will accept that when you tell them. Railroad history is little known and obscure enough already without perpetuation of unrealistic images.

1. DC steam locomotives back in 1960 all had one wire to the tender. The engine would pick up on one rail, the tender would pick up on the other.  The first HO steam locomotive I ever saw back then was a Varney Casey Jones. It had that one wire to the tender and I thought it was the neatest looking thing I ever saw, just like the hoses on the steam engines that I had seen only a couple of years earlier on the T&NO back home. The several wires on today's DCC steam locomotives can push the tender wrongly to one side or another or pick it up slightly off the rail, causing a derailment. Some are easier to cure than others. I've had a couple of tough customers. When you get them right, they can approximate the numbers of hoses that connected steam locomotives to their tenders.

2.  Geeper, I would think very long and hard before investing much in TT scale trains. Unless things have changed, there just is not the availability of just about anything that HO has.  I'm thinking more of supplies and ancillary items like trackside details, signaling, structure kits, decals, and so on. You've probably looked at it harder than I have, but I have a feeling that going into a marginally popular scale like that, one will be constantly looking on eBay for old HP products items.  And wishing that you could get stuff that can easily be had in more popular scales. Plus, if you're getting up in age like me it's just really hard to see those smaller trains. I restarted Model Railroading 15 years ago after being out for 40. The few HO items I had saved from way back in high school days had burned up in a house fire, so I could've started in N scale from ground zero, and I thought real hard about it.  HO won out for all the reasons listed above, and I've never regretted it. Plus, a friend of mine with considerable experience in the small scales says that operation can be very tenuous with low tolerance for only slightly unclean track and such. Plus the little cars are so light that realistic switching is almost impossible, smooth coupling up just cannot be had. Switching was going to be a major part of the branchline I had always wanted to build, so that pretty much sealed the deal to go to HO. I have never regretted it.  Even though I could've had twice the railroad in my space, it would've never operated to my satisfaction.

You need smaller steam engines for workaday purposes. 

When I first started my present layout, about 15 years ago, I knew it was going to be a branchline from the beginning. I told myself, I will never get an engine larger than a 2–8 – O. Then, I joined the club with an extremely large layout, having a mainline run of over 700 feet with several steep grades and curves. I bought a 4–8–2 to run on that layout, then four mikados. Then a couple of pacifics. Naturally right after I bought the Pacifics, the last ones of the bunch, the club closed and was torn down.  The only place left to run them was at home. And I rarely do it, because of the cabs hangover too far when going around certain curves and through sharp switches. I do use them as switchers in the yards on either end because supposedly that is mainline trackage where my branch intersects to go out Into the backwoods. But their days of hauling 40 and 50 car freights are over.

I have a variety of consolidations, 10 wheelers, and decapods to work the actual railroad. But, really, the only ones to get a consistent workout are the decapods ...... penultimate short line locomotives if there ever was one. And they've always been a favorite of mine since I saw a photo of one of them working on the MP back in the 40s near Baton Rouge Louisiana.

1.  Your Berk is an aftermarket repaint. Hopefully they didn't trash the whole engine with a lousy job.

2. pick ups on the tender only are not so good. The engine might start stalling on unpowered switch frogs and and places where some gnat left a calling card on the rail.

3. Never heard of an HO scale steam engine that actually emitted steam from places like cylinder cocks and pop valves. I have seen videos of it on very large scale engines, but they were very large, almost to where they could've been actual live steam engines.

Geeper, I started limiting the use of longer-than-40' cars on my relatively small layout quite a while back, even though I have a good population of really nice 50-foot cars.  My layout is a branchline about 50 feet long with an interchange point on either end. There's the interchange track, a run around track a two track yard that holds about five cars each, and a couple of ag branch type customers like co-op warehouses, and oil dealers. Nothing to excite mainline enthusiasts, but running between those two terminals, if you can call them that, and set-outs/pick-ups at rural settlements out on the line can take hours. But, the rub is that there's room for only about 35 40-foot cars on the layout to operate well. After that it's too crowded. And even less if the rural open space that I strive for begins to be compromised. A couple of 50 foot cars can really eat into limited space.

One car I really miss running is a string of 50-foot wood express reefers like we used to see in strawberry country in southeast Louisiana, spotted at almost every team track along the Illinois central between Baton Rouge and Hammond.  I have a bunch of those cars, but they really eat up my track if I have more than a couple of them on there at once.

And I can't even think of my complete head-end heavyweight passenger train I ran with my MP 4–8–2 on the now long-gone club.  Maybe one day....

HP products is still in business:

https://www.hp4stamping.com/history/

Just not the model railroad business

Apparently there's a forum for H P Products TT scale-

https://www.ttnut.com/viewforum.php?f=22

"Crude" wasn't the right description of the paint job on the brass SSW long caboose.  It's very cleanly done. It's just a little, well, bright. A little too Crimson to match the SSW color. Nothing that a little weathering powder wouldn't tone down.

I have a second one that is more correctly painted. When I saw it in the glass display case at the LHS, it was correctly lettered.  When I got home, I saw that the previous owner had only lettered one side of the car. Why, who knows. I just keep that side of the car facing to the outside of the layout. Maybe one day I'll fix the other side.

Quentin, excellent reading.

https://www.amazon.com/Cotton-Belt-Engineer-Standefer-1898-1981/dp/1449069207

Trivia:  What cellphone company did the SP jumpstart?

Right on, Len