My evaluation
So far I haven’t notice anybody remark that Jack the German has his picture on the battery cover of the remote. ( Jack is so photogenic )
As others have found, the positive connectors on the AAA batteries on the remote needed a little tweak with a screwdriver so that they made good contact.
It is a nice looking engine with crisp paint. It had the usual small scuff marks on the center line of the silver paint both in the front and back on the roof. Otherwise no paint defects that I noticed.
The sound volume is controlled by the remote. After much head scratching and complaining to myself about no directions on how to control volume, I looked at the side of the remote, and there was the volume control.
The directional headlight and reverse light are bright and work as advertised. The round red lights in the number boards look weird.
Run by itself, the engine is comfortable and somewhat sedate at 9 volts, it is still happy at 12 volts, and is a real racer at 18 volts.
When is starts to move, it jumps, and when it stops it really stops. At any voltage. It slows down nicely, and then bam, it stops.
It is hard to inch the engine up to another car. First it doesn’t move, then takes off like a battering ram. If you try to move back and forth to line up with something, you just end up with the engine jumping 3 or 4 inches from forward to reverse.
Run with a heavy load it was a different matter. I had some problems with the rear engine coupler opening by itself.
I ran it with 3 dummy diesel engines as a load, just for weight. Probably the equivalent of 6 or 8 heavy cars. On the flat it ran fine with this load, but on about a 3 % grade the engine lost traction and stopped moving, just spinning its wheels. A little extra weight might help here, because it seems to have plenty of power, even if it is spinning in one place jumping up and down with no traction.
This would probably be fine with many lighter cars on a flat layout.
My wife liked it. I liked it.
