I too, was skeptical about how MTH HO offerings would ‘stack-up’ compared to the competition.
I’m not an employee of Mike’s so let’s try to avoid the bashing here for a moment.
Having purchased several of the Precision Craft Hybrids and BLI Paragon2 models, I can tell anyone straight forward:
My advice is don’t knock the MTH till you’ve actually seen one and operated one in person…they are very impressive and in terms of quality, IMHO, they equal anything from BLI- if not better.
The smoke and station sounds can be easily avoided or turned off if you’re a snob to this, simply with the push of a function key. the station arrival, disembarkation, embarkation and departure sequences are only on when you activate them with the throttle.
As far as the scale speed, there is not anything smoother on the market- period. Actually, the MTH models utilize a Canon Can motor so that’s about as good as it gets.
I love my decapods from PCM/BLI but the MTH is a much better and smoother running model.
The detailing is more impressive than you might think for my money, and they have sold me.
The thing I noticed on the MTH 20th Century streamlined Hudson is that the dark gray stripe and NYC lettering on the tender is very high - it’s maybe 12+" higher than it should be. I don’t know if they had to do that to make the stripe line up with their new passenger cars or what, but it’s pretty bad.
The “NEW YORK CENTRAL” lettering should be level with the engine no. on the cab.
I checked the prototype pictures the location of the lettering looks high to me also, but we are living in an age where details and facts do not count to most of the people who purchase trains or even most other things today. The color and lettering might be a pre-production type of mistake and most do not even have pictures to look or compare the real one too. It would not be a show stopper to 80% of the buyers for this model and the Union Pacific 4-12-2 they offer really has issues with detail.
The top of the stripe is close but the overall wide of the stripe is too narrow. It will probably match their passenger cars. The picture below is from the Fallen Flags web site and did not link up. Sorry.
After a grade crossing wreck in 1945, the streamlining was removed from all of the Dreyfus Hudsons. Too bad since this was a work of art and is still recalled today by the art world as a sy
Excellent post, I myself just witnessed one running in person at my LHS tonight, it was the UP 9000, obviously it was set to articulated mode, going around the hobby shop’s layout circle of only 18" radius track. But you can simply set it to normal mode on the layout at home that has wider curves. The slow speed was amazing, the sound was better than mostly anything put out by BLI IMO, the illimunated marker lamps on the rear of the coal load, and upper part of the tender were simply amazing. The class lights on the front are not prototypically correct, I can understand the concern on this board about this flaw.
Putting that one flaw aside, the illuminated number boards were very detailed, which was nice to see. As a fan of nightime running, I must buy one of these engines.
And this whole time the engine was running on the shops MRC prodigy DCC system. It ran great, no problems at all. Lucky for me, never heard a crew chatter, or anything like that
Along with the stripe and lettering being misplaced, the top and bottom stripes are the wrong color as it looks on the picture. The stripes should be blue and should match the 38 Century Cars.
Update guys, if you check MTH’s homepage, they just put up a video of the Empire State Express version, which IMO looks even better. I’ll definately be buying one of these.
Thanks for posting the link. Actually I looked at the video the other day. While I agree the MTH Hudsons a nice looking model and sound good, I’m going to hold out for the BLI Brass-Hybrids. (And actually have one on pre-order.)
Matt Williamson was kind enough to post a pre-production picture of it on their forum. Here it is unpainted:
(For me - If it looks THIS good without paint?..I can’t wait to see it when it IS painted.)
BLI is scheduled to release their Dreyfuss Hudson this December but I’m not going to hold my breath. They will also be “re-announcing” it sometime in the near future with their new features. My hope is that BLI’s version of the 20th Century Limited will be outfitted with their new Paragon2 decoder, which supposedly has better BEMF than the QSI decoders.
The one thing that bothered me about the video (and I don’t often see other manufacturer’s emphasize this much either) is that MTH never showed how sloooooooow their Hudson could go at speed step 001. For me, this is paramount to a well-operating locomotive. Often I see demos of locomotives making jackrabbit starts rather than realistic ones what start slow and gradually ramp up to speed.
My Trix 2-8-2 Mikes are my benchmark for my steamers, with my Proto 2000 0-8-0 switcher a close 2nd. I have two of them in the NYC scheme and it’s a thing of beauty to watch them ooze to a crawl on speed step 001. And both of them did this right out of the box, with NO tweaking needed.
My BLI Mike and Mohawk (with QSI decoders) are good but they require some adjusting of CV2 in order for them to start out more slowly. Unfortunately, t