Good morning all of you wonderful people. I hope the holidays are finding you & your families well! Yesterday while I was checking Facebook, I saw some fantastic and exciting news from BLI. They shared a photo of an incomplete preproduction sample from their factory, a new Mikado! Reportedly, it will be DCC and Sound (Paragon3) equipped. I see modern detail levels (not all cast-on parts) and a promisingly accurate Glacier Green boiler... how many of us could use something a bit fresher than the Kato Mike? Bet it's well past time for a new 2-8-2 on the market. The sample below looks good enough to warrant my interest, how about all of you?
IF they did an SP version with a vandy tender, they would get my attention. I am not necessarily a fan of their sound but it would do. It would have to have good traction to pull a 7-8 car consist of heavyweights. Guess I can only wait to see official announcement with roads to be produced. Carl
I'm calling BLI. I am pretty sure they don't want to be responsible for a death by cartwheel! Kidding... But yeah, NYC, SP, all the versions they could do with a tight Mikado driver arrangement are almost absurd! I'd buy an H10 without hesitation.
.......with a vestibule cab......................... I do hope that they correct the error that they made with the NYCS in HO. They issued it with a correct number, but, they put NEW YORK CENTRAL in Central Gothic on the tender, which is incorrect. It should read NEW YORK CENTRAL SYSTEM. The USRA heavy was Class H-9 2-8-2 and was unique to the P&LE/P-Mickey on NYCS. Rarely did they stray off P&LE/P-Mickey rails. Kato got it correct on theirs, although there is a curiosity with Kato's. The tender lettering is Central Gothic, but the cab number font is the old Railroad Roman. Oddly enough on the H-9, there never was P&LE/PMcK&Y sublettering in the coal boards in Central Gothic. In Railroad Roman, there was......................but this leads to another error............... By the time of Central Gothic, P&LE had swapped the USRA standard tenders on the H-9s for the larger tenders on the underachieving H-8s. When McKee's Rocks did this, it moved the compressors to the pilot deck and put shields in front of them. The H-8s got the USRA standards, as P&LE used them as large switchers once the H-9s and H-10s had arrived, until selling the H-8s to industrial concerns or to Mexico. P&LE had H-10s of its own, and numbered them 191-211, instead of in the 9xxx series, which was the series reserved for P&LE. In the very early 1950s, it received five vestibule cab H-10s from parent NYC that had been equipped for passenger work. My numbers may be off by one, or so, but the passenger equipment on only three of them was serviceable. McKee's Rocks did put the passenger equipment on one more back into service, but did not bother with the other one. Jack Polaritz wrote a very informative book on P&LE's mikados. The 2-8-2 was the main freight power of the P&LE in the steam era. In fact, its "Berkshires" were really mikados with larger fireboxes. I noted that when BLI issued its USRA light 2-8-2, it did not issue one in B&O. The first USRA locomotive built, a light 2-8-2 assigned to the B&O still exists. It does not run and I do not know if it ever could be made to run, again. The B&O had one hundred originals of these things.
I recently returned my HO BLI Mikado due to continuous poor pickup and tracking issues. I think I'll stick to kato in N for reliability, even if the detail isnt quite as crisp. For the high price they are sure to be I can't justify another shelf queen, so unless they are proven as well running locos and are entirely prototypical for my roads (I'm all for generic locos to allow greater roadnames, but not at $400+ a loco!) this will get a pass from me.
ANOTHER USRA mike..... yawn. Now, if they did some pre or post NON-USRA mikes, I might get excited. Especially a light one, with removeable sand and steam domes. Just dreaming!
B&O Q-4 BLI (and I think B-mann did it, too) did do The Borg in HO. The Borg had what were essentially copies, but with a slightly longer wheel base. They were the so-called "Mountain MacArthurs" that worked passenger trains on the OSL.
I already have two sound equipped Model Power Mikes so I will pass on these unless they are really top notch and don't have any problems like they had on one of their recent products.
Seems as though sales on the M1a/b and T1 were enough to convince BLI to go all-in on N scale steam- good! I was honestly expecting (and maybe hoping, just a little bit) either a Pennsy I1 or J1 next, since they'd have been able to re-use some of the tender parts and cut down on development time (and, if the J1, slide directly from there to a C&O T1, as the mechanism would be the same with all of 1" difference in driver diameter between the prototypes), but... hey, something for everybody isn't a bad thing.
EXACTLY my thought. I've bought two Hiawathas to support Kato in their venturing away from just UP and ATSF LOL.... I bought BLI's F Units in several road names and had to "hobbyist" them into wonderful locos, but it's worth that for a guy who runs odd road names. Edited to say... I don't need more than 1 Hiawatha, but the first set was darn welcome. I gifted the second for Xmas. If Kato gets around to retooling the Empire Builder or venturing into NCL territory... well, I'll die a happy man.
Heh... I ended up with two Broadway Limited sets, though the second one was mostly so I could get my hands on duplicates of the otherwise-unavailable Pennsy car types that were in the set so I could use them for other things. I hadn't thought about it that way... but it's a valid point. Kato does like to "Go West" whenever they aren't being dragged kicking and screaming in the other direction (and their insistence on not selling unique cars separately is infuriating, especially since they already do so with the motive power). BLI, at least, focuses on the Eastern roads. If Kato won't pick up the ball on that Dreyfuss Hudson everyone wanted... well, now that BLI is branching out beyond just Pennsy steam, the chances of that happening just got much better. Not to mention all the other steam from their HO lineup that might get downsized. Since they've got the sound decoder size issue resolved (if they put one in the USRA Mike's tender, they must have), that's no longer a limiting factor for most of the models they'd be likely to produce as (apart from the 2-8-0s) most of them had tenders either of equal size or larger. I don't really have a need for USRA heavy Mikes... but I'm happy to see them anyway for what they suggest about BLI's new policy towards steam models. The more the merrier.