Has anyone bought or have any experience with the new DCC ready IHC steam locos? What kind of decoder did you use and can you put in a sound decoder? They have one or two I like and the price is pretty good but IHC is pretty new to DCC.
I installed an NCE D13SRJ in my IHC 2-10-2 shortly after I purchased the loco in early 2006. It plugged in easily and runs well. I will eventually install sound in the loco - I think there’s plenty of room in that big tender.
I installed a Tsunami Heavy Steam sound decoder iin the IHC 2-10-2. It was almost a plug-n-play installation because there is an NMRA 8-pin decoder socket in the tender, and there are holes in the tender floor above the rear truck for the speaker.
The Tsunami decoder has a 9-pin JST header on it that is hidden under some shrink wrap. I cut away enough to unplug and supplied solder-in wiring harness and install a short harness with the NMRA 8-pin plug on one end and the JST 9-pin plug on the other. I used an oval speaker and enclosure that were recommended by Bruce at Litchfield Station.
The only difficulty was figuring out how to fasten the speaker and enclosure, because the tender has wires coming up from the rear truck right in the center of the speaker cutout.
I’ve heard generally good things about the IHC engines like their 2-10-2. Only thing I’d be wary of is the ones with the “vanderbilt” tenders…I don’t think there ever was a tender that really looked like that; I think the IHC engines have (or had at one time) tender-mounted motors, so their vandy tender is distorted out of shape to fit the motor.
I noticed the, well, what I thought was a 9-pin jst hidden under some shrink wrap but didn’t mess with it. the instructions say don’t remove the shrink wrap or you’ll void the warranty, doesn’t say about trimming it back a tad either, so I just hard wired everything. Like you, I had the 9 pin to 8 pin plug in hand, but decided against it. figured ya just never know.