Are they all EZ mates (brown coupler with a spring on the glad hand) or are some of them the dummy couplers (black coupler, no spring or brake hose) that come with all the trainset equipment and the bulk freight cars?

The dummy couplers will not auto couple with anything.

The EZ mates take a pretty good hit to auto couple. The springs are a little stiff and the gladhand doesn't always open easily. If you are looking for automatic coupling for switching operations and such, you should look to converting to Micro-Trains couplers. They are the bench mark for a knuckle coupler.

I've never had a problem on Kato #6 ever. #4's are different story and sometimes need turning.

The only thing Bachmann has to go from one "radius" to the next is the double track crossover. The standard turnout is about as non standard as it gets, the curve is 11 1/4" and the straight does not match any existing length straight or combinations of straights that they currently make. The #6 turnouts do not give a standard double track spacing and there are not enough options in small straights to place between them to get it right. Also doing that you can not get the two resulting parallel straights to end at the same length without custom cutting track.

If you are wanting to do more complex track layouts, it is time to consider flex track and numbered turnouts or if you must have roadbed style track, maybe move to Kato track which has a more well thought out geometry and design plan.

It's about time to bring the Heavy Mountain tooling out of mothballs.

I know some of the roads stagnated but the C&O's were gone from shelves within the first month of release. I need a couple more and I know a lot of people looking for their first. I have been offered $500 for one of mine at a show over a year ago. You could just bring back multiple road numbers of C&O with tender variations and justify a new production batch. You could get crazy and make a new pilot, borrow the EM-1 tender and make a pretty close B&O T-3/4 Mountain.

Athearn discontinued kits, not because of popularity, but because with the extra staff/cost needed to handle missing/broken parts. Between having a customer service person to handle the calls, keeping an inventory of spares, and the cost of shipping/handling those replacement parts, kits were costing them more to make than the RTR cars. When an RTR left the factory, in theory it wasn't missing any parts.

RTR was cheaper and easier for the companies to deal with than kits.

Hudson was one of the first decent quality steam loco's produced in N scale. Originally released by Con-cor, using a Kato build mechanism, before Kato was a household word in N scale.

That said, it may be enough to give reason to buy the Kato passenger set now. Had no desire for more boring E8's but steam, even though not completely correct, will look much better at the head end of that train.

What type of lighting is in the room? 

We tried to set up a Dynamis system in our store for our display/test track. It would not communicate at all. We fought with it for a week. I finally took it to the back room, away from the fluorescent lights of the show room and it worked fine. We sent it back to Bachmann, they replaced it and the new one acted the exact same way. At that point we boxed it up and shoved it aside. It wasn't worth the hassle.

It works fine under incandescent or natural lighting but fluorescent lighting messes with the infrared for some reason.

Tomix runs them every 3-5 years it seems. It may be time for another batch. They do Thomas, Percy, James, and Henry along with a half dozen different car types. They are Japan only releases due to Licensing restrictions.

Ebay was your best source.

Unless Bachmann has put an upgraded decoder in them, there isn't anything you can do other than maybe look for binding in the slower loco. Their basic decoders don't support Vmax, only Vmin (Start Voltage).

Check the slower loco for binding or any odd harmonics or noises that could be causing the slow down. At slow speeds the decoder can mask the added drag which is why they could be matched well at the start.

Somebody out there has already created a dummy plug to fit in place of the decoder socket that made a fairly simple fix but you have to come up with the right plug to do it and then decoder the pinouts.

Our loco's finally arrived at the shop today so I will have a little more input after I take them home and play with them.

Honestly, the tree armatures that come in the kits are closer to N than HO. Most people make their trees much too small. Trees should dwarf the buildings and trains around them.

Quote from: ACY on March 16, 2015, 06:17:45 PM

Quote from: kmcsjr on March 16, 2015, 05:26:09 PM
I will investigate this, this weekend, but I run DC and DCC. If I turn the sound off, using my DCC controller, will it stay off in DC?

Marty,
Anything that you program with a DCC system will remain if you run the locomotive on analog (DC) or digital (DCC). Provided you do not reset the decoder, the CVs will retain their values until you either reset the decoder or reprogram it.

This is not true. There is a particular set of CV's that control how the loco works in DC mode. You must set those CV's to determine if the sound is on, the lights are on, etc. in DC mode.

That depends on how many trees you want on the layout. The Supertrees make very nice trees but the do require a bit of work. The starter kit doesn't come with as many armatures as the refill kit but it does have a nice compliment of tools and things you need to get started. I would say the starter kit has enough to make around 20 trees depending on size and how you prune things.

Did the loco come in a train set? Those are the only DC F7's of the current design that I know of.

Most all of the Bachmann DCC equipped loco's are geared to run scale speeds. If you are comparing them to a trainset level DC locomotive, there will be a huge difference in maximum speed. As the older loco's that came in the trainsets get replaced and retooled, everything will be back to the same speed.

Bachmann, Atlas, Intermountain, Fox Valley, and Lifelike have all gone to scale speed gearing and motors. Kato has not and their loco's will run 200+ smph at full throttle. Older loco's designs will be similar, the Bachmann train set loco's GP50, GP40 Etc are very old designs and still run like it.