Hi bob,
Actually, the owner complained that his locomotive puts out TOO Much smoke - a complaint repair technicians rarely hear. (What we do hear is "how can we get MORE smoke out of it")
I'm not sure if there IS a way to tell if the loco is from 2014 or 2015 other than putting 15 drops or so "down the hatch" and running it in Conventional mode with the rheostat under the tender fully clockwise and then fully counter clockwise to see if the smoke stops. My bet is that they ALL came from the same production run and will ALL be so affected. BUT... I've been know to be wrong and I'm sure someone here will correct me if that's the case!!!
In the locos that I've had with this issue, the smoke CANNOT be shut off in conventional mode and CANNOT be "toned down" enough when using the DCS Remote Commander hand-held controller. Perhaps its just the fairer sexy complaining to their hubbies but it really is an issue that MTH corrected with the release of the updated SOUND FILE which; when downloaded, contains the CHAIN FILE.
The CHAIN FILE is all you really have to load into your loco to correct the issue and the original sound file can be left alone during this procedure. If you load both the CHAIN FILE and the SOUND FILE, the procedure takes considerably longer.
Hope this helps...
My email address is in my profile should you have any additional questions Bob.
Best,
Dave
