Has anyone purchased the HO Athearn Amtrak p-42 currently offered by Walthers? I inquiring as to the ease of installing a DCC decoder w/ sound into this unit and which DCC unit would you recommend? I have not purchased either yet and am looking for recommendations.
I have the older run that was last year. The numbers I have are 10 and 55. Installing DCC is really simple in these units. It’s just plug and play. I used TCS decoders in mine. I later ripped out the PC board and all of the lights and installed LED headlights and ditch lights. I had to hard wire the decoder plug in order for the ditch lights to work.
I am going to install sound decoders in mine. I am using Loksound because some internet sellers have the custom P42 sounds installed on them. QSI also makes a decoder with sounds that are quite close as far as the engine sound and horns go.
Good luck with these units.
Thanks for the info!
Yes the newer Walthers/Athearn P42s have a 9 pin JST connector built into the Athearn light board. If you want accurate sound, you can go with the custom Loksound 3.5 Sound Decoder available from Ulrich Models.
I helped get the sounds to Ulrich for use on this custom decoder. Loksound already had a nice sounding K5LA horn so that is stock on the decoder. The special sounds include actual recordings from an Amtrak P42 bell and compressor. You won’t find anything this close to the real thing on the market.
Another nice aspect about Loksound is you can alter the sounds using your computer and the Lokprogrammer. I have yet to purchase the programmer, as it is expensive. But it is nice to know I can customize the sounds with my own recordings in the future. Soundtraxx Tsunami has no such feature [xx(]
And you can custom order the decoder from Ulrich with a 9 pin connector so you can plug it straight into the Athearn board. However with this setup, the lights tend to be dim. Two sets of resistors, one from the Athearn light board and one on the Loksound decoder, limit the available current. At least that’s my guess. But I’m eventually changing to LEDs, so I’ll have to rewire the whole thing anyway.
Here’s a link:
Ulrich Models Amtrak P42 Loksound decoder
The custom P42 sound can be found near the bottom of the page. Look for the section named, “Ulrich Custom Files”.
One other thing you might want to look into is a bass reflex speaker. You’ll need a 100 ohm speaker for Loksound. This kind of speaker greatly improves the prime mover sounds. Just find one that can fit in the shell. You might have to do some frame cutting to fit it in. But the sound improvement is immense with a bass refl
I’ve seen the new run of p42 engine in person and it looks impressive. Fit and finish is good, with a slight hint that you are looking at a plastic model. I think they should have went extra step and make it a Genesis line, because the base model is of great quality. It runs fairly quiet. Lights are LED by the way, so that might make DCC decoders installation truly plug and play.
Dealer didn’t remove the shell, but based on the diagram there is no speaker enclosing. I wonder where it would go, and how I would fit it to the engine. I’m really interested in people experiences upgrading it to a DCC with Sound engine. I was told by the same dealer that Soundtraxx makes a Tsunami with a P42 soundset. But figuring in a $100 price tag + $80 for diesel + $10 for speakers - is another reason I think Athearn should’ve done P42 in Genesis line 
Interesting news. Sort of surprising since Athearn has been using those 1.5 bulbs for quite some time. Nice news though. Now I might have to get two of the new batch. Looks to be road numbers 44, and 139.
Not quite specific enough for the P42 yet. My bet is the dealer is referring to their GE FDL-16 choosing a K5LA horn. Which is an acceptable choice. But if you are picky about Amtrak sounds like I am, you’ll notice some irregularities. For one, the bell is too high pitched. And I don’t hear any compressor sound in their online sample. The prototype compressor has a very distinctive “whoop” startup sound.
I’d go with Soundtraxx Tsunami if they had the right sounds. But as of now, they don’t. I doubt they ever will either since the bell is common among their diesel sounds. And the compressor I refer to is also pretty distinctive to the P42. Dash 9s have a similar sounding compressor, but it’s not 100% the same sound.