I purchased my President's Choice 2-10-2 Santa Fe tonight (Friday) at my local Zehr's Store in St. Catharines. This by far is tha best looking localing IHC Pres. Choice local to date.
The locomotive is numbered 4100 - it is generic - nevertheless it looks great !! The box photo or advertisment photo does not do it justice. The engine has many free standing boiler parts, including the sand liines and the elesco feedwater and its associated piping. The engine is painted a uniform flat black with a white strip along the lateral walkways. Uncoupling levers and the railing along the boiler side are black wire. The drive rods, valve gear and spoked drive wheels are blackened. The elesco pump, cooling pipes, etc are also freestanding. The elesco feed water heater is well proportioned and finely molded.
The vanderbilt tender is the same as what came with 5700 and 6060 - as you know it is oversized and not very prototypical - however, the overall flat black paint of the tender makes it much more palatable than the gaudy green beast than came with 5700 and 6060. The tender has "Canadian National" spelt out is white letters across the aft round body of the tender. A photo, circa 1925, (source CN Lines V. 11, N.3) of 4101 shows a similar tender display. Photos, between 1937 and 1957, of sister locomotives show a more typical red tilted herald . For the fun of it, I placed a tender from my Athearn Genesis Mikado (though it is not a Vanderbilt) behind the 2-10-2, and I thought that it looked very confincing for a generic locomotive.
There is a favorable review of IHC 2-10-2 in the November 2006 issue of Railroad Model Crafstman. This review states that the IHC model comes with a 6 page instruction sheet with a parts list, exploded drawing of the assembly, together with instructions with how to add a DCC decoder. Unfortunately, these instruction sheets are not included in the President's Choice version.
I have not run the locomotive yet, or have I opened up the tender to see if there is a DCC plug or speaker opening - supposedly they are included in the IHC versions.
Regards,
Badger.
