Can it go any faster?
I guess I’ll find out in a couple of days.
Of course it can. I have it on an 8 foot test track, trying to operate it and a video camera at the same time, so I’m not going to have it go that fast and risk an accident.
mine just arrived, still in box , just got home, pics later
quick test run, very nice. Good sound, didnt even hit the horn yet, well, one blat test., starts creeping on throttle 1 setting. One word. Big. One unit is just short the Y6B maybe 20 feet. My South Shore little Joe is just shy the centipedes length. BLI has flexed the front porch. 24 inch radius the overhang is big still. This engine is better on larger radius I don’t care what model maker claims how sharp radius these engines like this can take, they are better on larger radius 28 inch, 36inch even better, you will still have overhang. The engine derailed on a bad part of my track, this is why I value such an engine to help define track problems and fix them. Looks like I got work to do 8-D I have a good size long dogbone test loop so I can get some cars behind this for a test run, I’ll fix my track before this. Still waiting for my Athearn Turbine to arrive.
They do sound nice don’t they? Unusual sound at start-up though. Almost like an added “doppler” effect to the engine sound. And the really are big, approx 25.5 inches for the two combined.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFU0uqXaCsE my quickie video, done on an old AMD system 950mhz Duron using a Matrox Mystique Rainbow runner and a Big Picture camera (US Robotics) to capture, the camera is NTSC with an RCA plugin to the Rainbow runner. Works great, I could a have done a higher quality but 56k here, video size, 3 megs. Fixed my little track problem goes over the mini-bump fine. I started adding cars to it and put them on a crawl and kept adding cars as it crawled. Got up to 54 cars. Ran it around, and in a few areas of the test track it spins slipping, barely, I hike it up and it gets going. Pretty heavy train, mostly hopper cars and others. So ran it around a few times, no derails (yay! well one minor boxcar a wheel off, old mantua or something with big coupler pocket interfering with wheels, pulled it off, added 2 hoppers). Soooo, I decided to try the BLI Y6b to compare, and it walked away with the train no slipping. Looks like the Centipedes could use a little more weight test layout has 24 inch radius with some wider maybe 30 inch.
To the PRRT&HS modeling committee: WELL DONE. If there was ever a case where a historical society had imput on a model this is it. It looks like BLI followed recommendations
to a T. To BLI: The engineering of the articulation between the lead trucks
(Front and Rear) is less than it should be. I can’t back up on the flat without
the pilot truck closest to the cars being pushed twisting out of the way and
derailing. The bar the truck is attached to swings. One car is fine, 10 is not.
And if the cars are heavy “fugetaboutit”. Then while weathering them, I picked
one loco up and there was a wheel sitting in the table! I was able to remove the
bottom cover and slide it back on. While there I wanted to check the other
wheels, all of them were loose. REAL loose. DO NOT twist them ot guage them. There is a straight knurel on the axle that will ruin the plastic bushing in the wheel.
I washed the grease and oil off them and assembled them. Then put a drop of CA on the "hub end to attach the axle to the insulating bushing. I’ll be contacting NWSL for a better fix. The screws attaching the truck covers were already stripped their holes. Now the drawbar…
Is it supposed to be rigid in the KD Box? or have rounded ends? Where’s the
short one mentioned in the instructions?
Ken
If this was to work right for the reverse pushing, the truck wheels cannot have any side slop. They do. My solution is to rigidize the pilot porch with some sheet brass screwed in formed in the right places, and cut a slot in the truck for the pivot to slide sideways. My NWSL South Shore Little Joe is very similar and does not have a flexing porch, it has less overhang than the centipede, the porches are almost the same length. 
The coupler may swing out further but there are wide swing adapters and you can use a longer shank coupler to even that out, but it is NOT an issue on my 24" radius, normal #5 couplers. The other issue is the vertical curve at starting grades or rough track when you might slide the couplers out (build your track right!!!) If I find a spare set of any kind of trucks, I may experiment a rigidizing before I go headlong changing the centipede truck. I posted about this issue on the BLI site forum. I hope they fix it on the 2nd run, if if they do it. But I think the rigidizing fix is possible.
On a weekend trip to English’s Hobby Supply one of our club members got two Centapedes and we tried them on the club layout last night. In general they ran fine with a really pronounced overhang on tight curves. Sound was interesting with a longish interval between bell clangs and a horn that is probably authentic but sounds aneimic for such a big brute of an engine. Pulling power was quite good and tracking was pretty good on our rather rough track. On one curve to the left we noticed a pronounced knock as the leading truck of the lead engine articulated around that we could not account for. Overall it was very impressive and we were all pleased with it.