OK… So, my dad and I model Milwaukee Road, and I need to pick up a new steamer.
IHC has a 4-6-4- Hudson for $150, and it comes with either 3 free passenger cars or a free 0-8-0 Switcher w/ tender.
Anyone know anything about these loco’s as far as quality and/or being dcc ready?
It’s pretty tough to find anything steamer wise in Milwaukee Road these days… I don’t think there are any Spectrums in MR, but there are a couple of BLI’s out there… I’ve had an IHC in the past, and it was OK…
The IHC Hudson is ok. They do not do road specific details so the engine as a whole is rather generic. The one I have runs very well, I’m not a rivit counter so I’m happy with it.
It is not DCC ready. Plenty of room in the tender to install a decoder. You’ll have a few wires running between the engine and the tender though. The way mine fits in the box, this doesn"t present a storage problem.
You can always find their passenger cars very cheap, so I would go with the extra engine.
I recently purchased an IHC 2-6-0 Mogul and installed a MRC sound decoder into it. Based on this experience, I would not give IHC a ringing endorsement. This is my fifth decoder installation and by far the most difficult. This engine was not even close to being DCC ready. It didn’t even have a light board. All the gears were plastic, it had no fly wheel, and a cheap looking motor. I wouldn’t personally spend more than $35 for one of these locos.
I had a much similar experience with an IHC 4-6-2 Pacific. It was a very lengthy install, mainly due to having to work with the weights in the boiler section of the loco…
The weights didn’t cause me too many problems. The difficulty was that almost complete disassembly and rewiring was required. I started to wonder if I was going to have any of those dreaded “extra pieces” left when I was done.
IHC steam locomotives that I have worked on all required disassembly to access the motor terminals for decoder installation, and they all required soldering because they were not DCC ready.
Another problem is the way IHC connects the headlight wires. A couple of IHC locomotives I have put decoders into wired the headlight to the forward set of drivers and the motor to the rear set. If you want a decoder-controlled headlight, you have to change this wiring and add a current-limiting resistor to protect the decoder.
My latest installation was to put a motor decoder into a 4-6-2 Pacific and a sound-only decoder into the tender. Both Digitrax and TCS decoders with the 9-pin header were too large to fit without cutting off some of the weight, so I used a TCS M1 hard-wired decoder, which is extremely small. A SoundTraxx DSX sound-only decoder was put into the tender, which already had electrical pickup wipers for a backup light. No electrical connection at all is made between the locomotive and tender in this type of arrangement.
The really tricky part is synchronizing the start voltages of the motor decoder and DSX sound decoder so you don’t have fast-paced chuffing while the locomotive is sitting still.
if milwaukee road is your line…i picked up a nice rivarossi 4-6-2 heavy pacific from my local dealer…real sweet…you may be able to find these still around…don’t bother with ihc if you are trying dcc…
