Mlewski,
Barry is absolutely correct in advising you to install a fast blow fuse or circuit breaker. In other words, the mechanical circuit breaker in a post war transformer will NOT shut the power down fast enough if you happen to derail or suffer a short to your engine. If that happens, you may fry the electronic boards inside the engine. These repairs do not come cheap. Another alternative is to buy a modern transformer with an electronic circuit breaker such as an MTH Z1000 (about $100) or MTH Z4000 (about $425).
On the smoke/sounds issue, MTH PS2 engines had screws to adjust the smoke output and volume of the sounds on the bottom or inside an opening in the top of the engine. I do not clearly recall if PS3 engines have these adjustment screws (but I think they do) as I run command via DCS and Legacy for Lionel engines. I'm sure that Barry would know the answer to this question.
As others have said, you will have no problem running MTH proto 3 engines in conventional mode. Although you did not raise the issue, I recommend you consider purchasing a DCS remote commander (around $50) to run MTH engines in command mode. That set up has all the basic DCS features (direction, horn/whistle bell, sound, smoke etc). The DCS remote commander is sometimes called DCS Lite.
Erol Gurcan
