John, the train pusher, dropped off my OF 4-4-0 at lunchtime today. What a thing of beauty! It shipped with the straight stack installed, and, while I had originally planned to put the balloon stack on, I think now that it will have a better “family” look to the Forneys with the straight stack. I’m also going to keep the more modern disc wheels on the pony truck and the “switcher” pilot. Again, more of a familial look to match my other locos.

Bachmann have made some definite improvements in other areas of this model. The tender truck pickups look as if they’ll actually work, there’s an actually floating foot-plate and the two cables between the tender and loco get neatly concealed in a snap-in firebox cover. The tender floor is pre-cut for a speaker and, according to the drawing, the grill can actually be removed to leave a big, gaping hole in the bottom, which will leave much more room for speaker excursion if a flat speaker is used.

Unfortunately, this model doesn’t have sound installed, so I’ll need to put another one of those wonderful Soundtraxx Tsunami sound decoder on my shopping list…