I recieved my Athearn Greyhound Challenger locomotive from Caboose Hobbies today. This makes 3 locos that I now own. The Two-Tone Gray scheme is quite well done,but is marred by the Smoke Deflrectors atleast on my locomotive. They seem to be attached to the running boards slightly lowered at the front so the yellow stripe on the edge of the boards appears to gentely curve or droop down near the front. I guess some way could be found to gently bemd evetything up at that end. The complaints we had about blank number shields on smokebox fronts has been adressed. My locomotive 3977 has numbers and edging applyed to the shield, very hard to see on the gray locomotive, on the graphite front of a black fteight loco a black shield with white numbers probably shows up better. The oil bunker in the tender is the same modern one used on 3985 original bunkers featured one round filler hatch and lid and a short vent pipe located near the front. The Factory Default Sound Levels come set to High not Medium as on my previous locos, so I will have to turn them down. My locomotive runs fine going forward although the boiler was not always returning to center line after going through curves. It was really not centering when backing up, I carefully rebent 2 small wires under the smokebox , that appeared to be binding and solved this problem. My larger problem though, locomotive will not back up at a slow speed only at a medium speed. My other two locos will creep around the layouts not always clean track in reverse no sweat. When running in reverse at medium speed the locomotive sometimes comes to a sudden stop, but is still getting power as it is hissing steam sound,and you then have to re ramp up the speed to get going again. My Delema is this should I let my friend and Challenger expert Bob Gilmore (who has one dis assembled right now for detailing and 2 converted to shortened draw bars ) look at it to see if we can solve the problem, should I fill out the Warentee card and send loco to Athearn for replacement,or should I not fill out card and return complete loco to Dealer(Caboose) for replacement? Nate Goodman (Nato). Salt Lake,Utah. "This Post probly should have been reply to 2nd Run post."
