Post by bdhicks on Jan 30, 2016 1:08:21 GMT -8
My MTH DM&IR Yellowstone arrived today. I took it down to the club and everyone was pretty impressed, although there were some problems with the couplers and programming, which I understand is par for the course with MTH.
I replaced the rear coupler with the provided Kadee coupler, but even with the included shim the coupler was too high, so I had to make some more shim material to get it down to the right height. The front coupler was too low, so I replaced it with a dummy coupler (although I notice now that the front platform is loose, so I may try tightening that down and see if it fixes things). Programming had to be done in mainline mode, which luckily I had someone else at the club who was somewhat familiar with MTH programming, since I don't think I would have figured that out on my own. I can't figure out how to permanently disable the smoke, it seems to default to smoking even though F12 defaults to off (cycling F12 through on and back to off works, but is annoying to do every time it powers up)
The model itself is heavy and nicely detailed. We were having something of an open house at the club, so I wasn't able to experiment with pulling power, but it had no trouble with my ore train (currently at 28 cars, hopefully expanding soon). My kitchen scale says the loco is about 1 lb, 10oz, and the tender is a bit over 13 oz. Everyone at the club was pretty impressed by the look of the model, although like most articulateds it did look a little off going around the curves.
Of course, the most surprising thing about it was that I ran it several times around the layout at my club which is mostly SP modelers, and nobody told me I was running it backwards.
I replaced the rear coupler with the provided Kadee coupler, but even with the included shim the coupler was too high, so I had to make some more shim material to get it down to the right height. The front coupler was too low, so I replaced it with a dummy coupler (although I notice now that the front platform is loose, so I may try tightening that down and see if it fixes things). Programming had to be done in mainline mode, which luckily I had someone else at the club who was somewhat familiar with MTH programming, since I don't think I would have figured that out on my own. I can't figure out how to permanently disable the smoke, it seems to default to smoking even though F12 defaults to off (cycling F12 through on and back to off works, but is annoying to do every time it powers up)
The model itself is heavy and nicely detailed. We were having something of an open house at the club, so I wasn't able to experiment with pulling power, but it had no trouble with my ore train (currently at 28 cars, hopefully expanding soon). My kitchen scale says the loco is about 1 lb, 10oz, and the tender is a bit over 13 oz. Everyone at the club was pretty impressed by the look of the model, although like most articulateds it did look a little off going around the curves.
Of course, the most surprising thing about it was that I ran it several times around the layout at my club which is mostly SP modelers, and nobody told me I was running it backwards.
