Help! I just received my Southern Pacific 4-8-2 light mountain SoundTraxx equiped DCC locomotive. The problem is that it came with a coal tender instead of the vanderbuilt oil tender as advertised.
Is this to be expected from Bachman? Now… should I just live with it, send it back, or just buy a vanderbuilt tender? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.
Did you buy it from Bachmann directly, or from a retailer of some kind?
It’s certainly wrong, and you should take it up with the folks who sold it to you… If that’s Bachmann, by all means, make them put it right… But I ask because you rarely see people actually buying directly from Bachmann, when retailers usually sell the same loco for 33-66% of the price…
The type of tender you get depends on the roadname you select – different roads used different tenders.
A SoundTraxx decoder will usually not fit into a Vanderbilt tender, so you need to go back and read the fine print from the source where you purchased the locomotive and determine what you want to do about it.
I would check with Bachmann. Given the shape of the “plug and play” Soundtraxx sound decoder/speaker assembly, it wouldn’t fit in a vanderbilt tender, so they used a rectangular one. Unfortunately you might end up having to have an engine with the wrong tender but with factory sound, or one with the right tender and either no sound or adding a sound decoder to it yourself.
I believe this is the decoder w/ built in speaker they are using:
Wrong tender for sure for the wrong engine.
For the record… I bought the 4-8-2 on-line from GoHobbies. I don’t blame them for the incorrect tender. I think it’s more of a Bachman decision to go with a generic coal tender for all the roadnames they offer.
I really like the idea of factory installed sound, and the opinions seem to be that the SoundTraxx decoder will not fit into a vanderbuilt tender, anyway. So, I guess I’ll just have to turn a blind eye to my unrealistic tender. [:(!]
You can always take some styrene and camoflauge the ‘coal’ by converting the rectangular tender to an oil. Actually, Southern Pacific DID have a Mountain with a rectangular oil tender, the ex-El Paso and Southwestern 4-8-2’s which the road designated the MT-2 series. I’m just about to convert my Spectrum Heavy 4-8-2 to an MT-2. You’ll need some detail parts for the locomotive–an elesco feedwater heater (mounted on top of the boiler just in front of the stack), and PSC SP-type steam and sand domes. It will give you a fairly decent representation of one of the SP MT Mountains before they applied the Skyline casing during WWII. I don’t know about the ‘light’ SP 4-8-2 from Bachmann, but the Heavy version comes with the SP-type semi-Vanderbilt tender, which is quite a bit larger and a different configuration than the regular Vanderbilt type. I’m surprised that the manufacturer didn’t choose the semi-Vanderbilt for the Soundtraxx, since the tender seems certainly large enough to accomodate the system.
Tom