There's no volume control that I'm aware of (if there was, I'd probably crank up the whistle and bell sounds). The whistle doesn't sound all that 'natural' to me but it sounds okay. Personally, I wish my ET&WNC ten-wheeler had a whistle sound more like the ones that RR used on their engines, but the factory one will do.
These are my first sound-equipped engines ever (all four of my Bachmann ten-wheelers have factory sound), and for the most part, I'm happy with how they sound.

The ten-wheeler has a center blind driver and the front truck has a pretty wide arc of travel. I'm told that it'll handle 18" radius but my layout has mostly 24" radius (I think it's 22 at one spot). I've seen one on a 20" curve on another layout once.
The draw bar must to be set for the loco to be as far from the tender as possible.
Hope that helps.

I went to the National Model Train Show in Portland with some pals yesterday. It was a long and somewhat stressful trip due to the weather. There was a big storm front raging northward right during the show (hundreds of thousands of people in Washington were without power by nightfall) and caused some white-knuckle steering along I-5 heading right in the front. Thankfully, most of the damages was well north of Olympia, so I didn't get affected other than being pushed left and right along the drive heading down to the show, and being worried that a tree might fall on us.
Anyway, the show took the entire Expo Center just south of the Columba River. We were able to hit every hobby shop in Portland, and chase some 1:1 trains in the Vancouver. We also went to the engine house which houses SP 4449 and SP&S 700 and an ALCO PA. It was along but cool day.
There was a massive N scale modular layout which looked great along with numerous other module groups. I talked with the Editor of Model Railroader as well as the guy who had a lot to do with On30 at Bachmann. Real nice guys, both.
Surprisingly, I didn't buy much at all. I bought a loading dock laser kit in O scale, a White Pass & Yukon pin, a few magazines and a book the entire day. Typical; when I have the money as a show, I can never find anything I can't live without.
Here are some totally random shots I took with minor captions. It's not to be considered an overall review of the entire show at all. I hope you liked some of these shots. I didn't take a great deal of photos as I decided experiencing it was more important than recording it.
There was only one On30 display that I could find at the show:

While I'm no big (pun intended) fan of Z scale, I really liked what I saw in the module groups in that scale:


Note the rotors spinning on this scale Chinook helicopter:

Lots of N scale stuff at this show. I'm a big Freedom Train fan and loved seeing these well-done AFT cars!

Woodland Scenics had their pilot models out, including their new O scale rural depot. Such a neat model in person!

Tomy had a neat booth, but nobody manning it could speak English. I wish I could have asked more about this really neat modern Japanese trolley layout:

And I couldn't resist this, as you just had to wonder what this was about, alongside a module of a open pit mine:

In Vancouver, evidence of the weather as the Amtrak Cascades had just hit a tree, breaking out a ditch light and parts of the tree were stuck in the plow..

Hmm. Nothing new in On30 except for DCC-equipped 2-6-0s. 
I'll be at the National train show tomorrow (fighting the weather every inch of the way, there's a bad storm front rolling through there tomorrow) and can't wait to talk with the Bachmann people at their both!

Mine lit up fine on analog but not for DCC
I yank the lighting for all my coaches as the RR I model never ran with lighting anyway for the most part...

I'm going to the National Train Show there on Saturday, but I couldn't get a single day off for the convention, darn it.
Does anyone know which Bachmann people will be at that show?

Quote from: railexpert on August 07, 2015, 06:29:43 AMNot every prototype vehicle lettered for each railway company you wish will be built in On30 as "ready-to-run" model.

Good luck getting most modelers to understand that. I got incredibly lucky when Bachmann decided to make the very prototype I wanted to model (ET&WNC ten-wheeler) in the right paint schemes for the time I wanted to model that RR. That alone brought me back into the model RR hobby after an absence of many years.
Total luck, being such a relatively obscure prototype (Yes, I know who at Bachmann is the big ET&WNC fan and that's why we have that in G and On30 from them). I do seriously wonder why people really think that some equally obscure prototype would be a big seller when in fact, they might be the only person who'd buy one. 

Quote from: Chatham on August 06, 2015, 05:21:46 PM

They've learned and probably dread the inevitable first question.

"What is the minimum radius" the new South Kohlrabi and Corncob 2-12-4T will negotiate on a 20 percent grade?

Man, I can so imagine that very thing. I showed someone pictures of my in-progress On30 layout and the guy actually marveled at how wide my curves were. Actually, almost all the mainline curves are at 22-24" but that's as wide as I could make them for the room size. He said, "I'd have made those curves way tighter" and then asked if my ten-wheelers could take 12" radius curves.
Yes, I'm serious about him asking, and so was he! 

Are sales in On30 really slowing or is this a guess? 
If they are, I would think that as On30 is a niche even among model RRs, there was only ever a finite number of people who were ever gonna take that on. And like any hobby, there are always trends that rise and fall in popularity.
But I really wonder if On30 stuff is selling less than it did. On30 was around for a long time before Bachmann did anything, but I wonder if people took off with it as fast as Bachmann entered the market and went with newer stuff over time.
Don't forget, many people in the hobby chance scales and gauges as often as someone changes channels when watching TV.

Yeah, it'll run without DCC. Before I ever hooked up DCC to my layout once it was built, I had bought all my ten-wheelers, all with sound. I test ran all of them and I noticed they all worked, but the following were issues:

• The exhaust sounds don't sync with the movement of the locomotives
  The whistle sounds 2 blasts going forward and 3 backing up each time you change direction. In real life, you would've done those signals anyway

On DCC, you can control the whistles yourself along with lots of other stuff you can't hear with DC. The 'chug' sounds on DCC sync correctly with the loco on DCC (4 exhaust sounds per revolution of the drivers).
In short, they'll run all right, but you really need DCC to experience all the sounds they can make. Otherwise, why'd you bother buying a sound-equipped engine?

Quote from: traingeek on July 31, 2015, 11:35:16 AM
That said, even though I have circled the globe to find the last of steam, the choice of obscure foreign locos for production has been misguided.  In my opinion, future releases  of  more basic domestic  locos of modest proportions would be more salable.

If you're talking about the stuff they make for other countries, I understand that Bachmann has a pretty large market in the UK and EU. As for the Chinese prototype HO stuff they make, I have no idea how those are selling...

I don't see Bachmann products getting cheaper at all. In fact, I've watched them climb in price, so much so that I doubt I could justify the cost to re-create my rolling stock roster today if I'd had to start the project now instead of the days when you could easily find freight cars for less than $20 each.

Quote from: Royce Wilson on July 20, 2015, 07:38:03 PM
I think the Baldwin 2-8-0 C-16 would have made a better choice than the 4-6-0.

I have talked with some Bachmann folks at a couple of shows and they've all told me that the ten-wheeler was actually a decent seller. If it wasn't for that locomotive, I never would have gotten back into model trains. A certain well-placed person at Bachmann is a big ET&WNC RR fan, and that's the ten-wheeler prototype. So that explains why they have it.
I'm thankful Bachmann made those as that's all I ever wanted in NG.
I've also seen a lot of great bash projects (in person and in magazines) done off of them.

Artistta makes some really good figures, but they're not very cheap.
My problem is trying to shoehorn figures into the cabs of my Bachmann On30 ten-wheelers. Nothing will fit through those windows. So far, I have taken the Woodland Scenics engineer set and cut each off at the waists to get them through the cab windows, then ACCing them in place. You can't tell that they have no legs when they're wedged into the cabs. I have an Artistta engineer and fireman , will be cutting the engineer down then mounting the fireman on the front of the tender with a shovel.
I only use figures in static poses, as I can't stand to see figures frozen in an action pose.

Back in those days, they'd tell the employees, "Now, don' y'all touch that thar wire, boy!" and anything you did after that was on you.
Good cooked? Same guy'd look over your charred corpse and say, "Dang gum it, that's th' fourth one we done lost this week!" and them go tell the hiring office they needed a new hand.
Settlement with the family, you ask? Not in those days! "He done knowed what he needed to do and e-lec-tro-cuted hisself anyway!"
Some mining outfits would even charge the family to remove the corpse.

If they're both doing it, I'd look to whatever you're running them with. While it's possible for two locos to have the same problem at the same time, it isn't likely.