i saw this guy http://www.bachmanntrains.com/home-usa/products.php?act=viewProd&productId=3012 today, i wonder if ,like teh prototype, it offers more power than the other locos in 2 weeks i'll be in little rock to see the real deal up close and personal.

edit: i forgot someone already started a thread over this.. oh well, now there's 2.

hey guys, i was going through my dad's attic, (well, actually my dad's attic was placed in a storage unit, but whatever) and in the unit was a mysterious box i did not recognize. I opened teh box to find teh remnants of our model train set. it is a Bachmann HO Union Pacific modern train set, with a diesel 866 loco. most of the cars were in peices, but i put them together. teh box only had about 5 lengths of track, a power supply, and some signage and grade elevation parts. needless to say... its mostly junk. (the caboose, 2 box cars, and a tanker is usable... but the rest has seen better days, the loco, a UP 866,  is ruined.), after discovering this, i remembered how much fun we had with it (he had a layout built 20 years ago but the box just has the leftovers from that) and wanted to bring it all back. so i guess i'm going to spend the next decade of my life persuing railroad modeling. but since i was 6 when we did this.. i dont remember hardly anything. and he wasnt a professional by any means, so i'm sure you guys would have way advanced what we were even doing. heh.

my frist question is this... i want this model of loco, http://www.bachmanntrains.com/home-usa/products.php?act=viewProd&productId=523, however i see there is a dcc model of the same here http://www.bachmanntrains.com/home-usa/products.php?act=viewProd&productId=1476. question is, right now my 'set' (lol) is not dcc. it is just regular old school 80s power. will a dcc loco work on the old setup (are they backwards compatible?) or will i have to get a regular loco for now, and wait a couple years until i have a grasp on teh fundementals before i switch to dcc, then get the dcc loco? and i've seen mention of dcc supporting sound... that one didnt say... would anyone know of a UP GP40 that supports sound? or is that a completely seperate deal? i want to start of with a regular power set-up, learn how to do tracks and stuff, learn some scenery fundamentals, and otehr things, then do another set-up in DCC after i figure out what i'm doing

next question, i am leaning FAR more to the modern era modeling, than yesteryear. as far as modern era goe sthere are a couple a techniques of weathering i want to apply (graffiti, heavy rust, oil spillage, and so on) is there a book, or video, or website or something that details a good amount of how to achieve certain looks? types of paint and techniques and so on? anything would help.

last question, i want my set-up build to be highly focused on white-collar america. huge skyscrapers and what not, and have teh trains be more a fixture of the wolrd, not the blatant focus. i came up with an idea of having the set-up be double layers. the top layer would have a train yard at the back, which does loop around the town for fun, and a trolley system that runs through the heart of downtown, but the main empahsis would be the bottom layer, i want to have a plexiglass window around the thenre bottom layer, and have a bustling subway system running under the city. with several stations, gang hide-outs, and so on. however i thought it would be interesting if i added 1 station on the top, and had that particular subway dip down through a tun to go under teh city, and then back up to hit teh station again, i'm getting teh idea from teh Runaway Mine Cart ride at Six Flags Over Tx. if anyone has ridden it, you know how at teh end it drops out, if you havent ridden it, a video is here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fPMZ4l8Y4w, anyway, i realize that the rollercoaster cars are all like, 3 feet in lngth, whereas a loco and train cars are liek 80 ft or so, so you have to have an extremley gradual grade.... would there be a way to do this without having a 12 inch wide hole? i guess it sounds 'toy like,' and if it comes to it, i may have teh city built up, and have it like teh station is at teh bottom of a 70 foot wide 20 ft. deep starcase (ho scale of course), and have the train just come out of a tunnel, and back in. bothw ould be decent, the latter being more realistic but the former sounds more fun. heh. i guess thats all. peace.
-keith