...If BLI would just paint the handrails in cases where the prototype has more than one color, it would be close to perfect. I don’t mind doing it myself but for $200 I shouldn’t have to.
Of the six N scale DCC/sound locomotives I have purchased this month, this one of two that I consider fully acceptable for money.
Frankly, out of all the locomotives I've purchased, both brass and plastic, I have never found a single example that's "perfect"...one that when I look at it closely, or run it for the first time, doesn't have something (or needs something) that I can "improve" a bit...or a lot.
Sometimes it's just minor, like most of my brass steam locomotives...which cost a lot more than $200...need their wheel faces & driver tires painted black, both on the engine and the tenders. I do that, and it improves their looks a lot.
Sometimes it's not so minor, like my brass GTEL Super Turbines...with their cast-on nose grab irons and top walkways that were solid cast metal instead of etched. I never got 'round to "fixing" those...all three of them, because I sold 'em eventually when I decided on my layout's era and they were too modern.
For nearly all of my cars and engines, the stock couplers have been replaced...starting with replacing all of my Rapido-couplered cars with N-scale Kadees, then, replacing all of my Kadee/Micro-Trains N-scale couplered cars with Micro-Trains Z-scale coupler, then, starting to replace all of those with Micro-Trains True-Scale couplers (much modified with 3D printed coupler pockets)...and now, replacing every stinking coupler with N-Possibles...which I think are perfect...and their addition to my cars and engines (along with their included brake hoses) makes those cars and engines appear much more prototypical to my eye, and to my camera. Out-of-scale couplers has bugged me since I started model railroading in HO way back in the 1950's, and now FINALLY great looking, great functioning scale couplers by N-Possibles has taken that perpetual gripe away from me.
So, I don't expect manufacturers to produce "perfect" cars or engines...I never did. Part of the fun for me is "improving" what I get in the box, so that it's individualized...by me. Friends who visit and bring their own engines and cars to run on my layout don't have a hard time figuring out whose cars and engines are mine, because mine are distinctive because the majority of my cars & engines are "improved" to one degree or another (and my color-coding on the bolster pins!)
In fact, when I open the package and take my engine out for the first time, I immediately start looking for things I can "fix" or "improve", then check the wheel gauge because 99.5% of all of my engines have at least one set of wheels that needs adjusting straight from the factory...then I run it, fix it if necessary and start inventorying in my brain what more I'm gonna do to it...FUN!
Cheerio!
Bob Gilmore
Because it's fun for me, I don't complain too often, except when a model really has some obvious cost-cutting done to it, like my Overland brass GTEL Turbines did
