I am looking for an ho scale 2 truck shay and a climax both dcc with sound but havnt been able to find any other than a Bachmann 3 truck shay and a climax with no sound.Any help would be much appreciated.
I don’t think either is available in HO scale with DCC or sound. The Climax is really small, hardly room to put a DCC decoder, but probably could. A speaker would be something else,
Only the Bachmann 3-truck Shay is big enough to have sound, and the speaker that will fit into it is so small that it has very weak volume.
Other than brass, the only 2-truck Shay I have ever heard of was from Roundhouse. The original Roundhouse Shay was a kit. They later came out with a pre-assembled, DCC ready version that was made in China, but the motor control decoder took up all of the available space and there was no room anywhere for a speaker. Rivarossi made a Climax, but there’s no room for a decoder or speaker in one of them.
The biggest problem with trying to fit sound into a Shay or Climax other than the lack of space is that you would have to remove so much weight that it will not be able to pull more than one or two log cars on level track. Even with the Bachmann 3-truck Shay, you had to sacrifice weight and pulling power for the speaker.
Rivarossi made a Heisler in two different styles, but I don’t recall a Climax from them. Roundhouse had their “Class A” Climax in either kit or RTR, but this was the boxcab mechanism with a different superstructure that was rather larger than most actual Class A Climax locomotives. Bachmann Spectrum’s 2-truck Climax was the first non-brass model of that style locomotive. The model tended to have some powertrain difficulty (and Bachmann could not repair one of mine that I sent back) and is generally no longer available. I found ONE at the Timonium show Oct. 11, but none were to be found at that show in the summer, and all the major distributors are sold out. Great strides are being made in getting decoders and sound into smaller and smaller locomotives, but these are very small locomotives compared to mainline tender-equipped rod locomotives and currently DC control is what is available (not that DC is a bad thing at all).
Bill