Beautiful looking engine. Can you tell much difference between this one, and the previous offering that you have?
Hey Ethan. I will post a few pictures and observations. This is a fresh out of the box photo. Received it yesterday.
I ordered this model and another ten-wheeler from MB Klein (modeltrainstuff.com). (Probably my last substantial purchase until after my boys finish college. Going to have to last 6+ years!) -Bob T.
I’m within an inch of buying one of these. Please post a performance report and a video of ultra slow speed operation on step 1 of 28 if you can. Have you tried changing any cv’s yet? I can’t imagine voice recognition cv control as TCS claims to have. “Hey Siri, change the whistle from the 5 chime to the 6 chime.” I’ll believe it when I see it. I’m a SoundTraxx guy through and through and was very disappointed to see Bachmann apparently changing decoder vendors.
The prior release looks quite similar to this new version of the Decapod. This new one seems to run well with less throttle needed to get it going, and it has sound with some kind of dynamic loading on the volume. The lettering may be a bit sharper on the new one as well. It needs some programming an better couplers, but it looks like it will be just fine. I first tested in on the tightest radius curves on the wye track which are 24-26 inch radius and it handled that just fine. The new one comes with an alternate set of trucks for the tender, maybe a later modification?
The WOW sound decoders have a voice confirmation of a CV set, not voice recognition. It's a neat feature for those who have lots of time to program CVs one by one on the mainline. Give me Decoder Pro and a Sprog to program one of those or a much easier to program SoundTraxx decoder. Like Loksound, the WOWsound decoders have too many customized features that take too long to program.
I checked Bachmann's web site, which listed the price of these babies as five-hundred-and-some dollars. You can find them on eBay and other sites for around half that. GS