I see on the big online auction/sale site that some vendors are taking the N scale 4-6-0 that comes with the "Whistle-Stop Special" train set and selling it separately as a DCC and sound equipped loco. Typically for around $170 and "no retail packaging". They must figure they can sell the parts of the set for more than the whole.  Does anyone have one of these and do you know if it is a true Soundtraxx Econami sound decoder or the earlier more stripped-down Sound Value Soundtraxx decoder?  There is not enough product information for me to tell, although I suspect it is not the Econami.   There is one reviewer video posted I've seen and the whistle sounds different from the ones on my 2-8-0 Econami equipped Consolidation.

Mine are just a friction fit.  A tight fit but the shell will pop off, you may need a small screwdriver blade between the shell and frame to start the process.

In case anyone is interested, I've checked the circuit board of the 2-8-0 Econami tender now attached to the 4-6-0 and all I see are two 1500 ohm resistors near the back.  There are 9 pins at the back of the board where the decoder plugs in.  I identified the headlight pins with a multimeter, going from L to R on the decoder,  pins #4 is L- or F0 (white), #5 is L+ (blue common).  I took off the decoder and used a 9V battery with leads to touch these pins.  I got a nice bright light with the battery, but not when the decoder is reinstalled and track power is used.

So I clipped off the headlight leads going from the loco into the 6 pin connector at the front of the board and using ESU decoder wire for extra length, bypassed the circuit board completely, soldering the headlight leads directly to the decoder pin terminals at the back of the board (there is actually a small solder pad at the base of each). I experimented with different resistance values attached to one of the leads.  I scrounged up a few surface mount resistors from old decoders and got a bit more brightness with 500 ohms but not enough, then 270 ohms, better but still not enough, then 210 ohms, no real change. I had a resistor marked 470 which is 47 ohms and went for broke with that.  Figured it would either blow the LED or work. 

So 47 ohms worked! Decent bright headlight, not as bright as I had when the ESU Loksound was wired in to the original 4-6-0 tender but quite acceptable . It seems to me that it is the decoder itself that is putting a low voltage or low current into the lighting circuit and not the circuit board's fault.  They give you 1500 ohms and  you have to reduce it to 47 ohms to get a reasonably bright headlight.

Well, right now I'm playing around with the circuit board of a 2-8-0 with Soundtraxx Econami plugged into the board. There is actually writing on the board which is a bit hard to decipher but I've now tested and confirmed.  Most likely this is the same for all their boards.  With the engine's front pointed to your left,  the left side of the engine is closest to you and the right farthest away, that is standard convention. There may be writing that says R, M+, L+ and L, M-, L-.  The pin closest to you should be L track power (black or -), the next is the left motor lead (gray, M-), the next is the healight (white, L-), the next is common (blue, L+), then the right motor lead (orange,M+), then the farthest is the right track power (red, R).  Most certainly the two outer pins are the track power, if you have a multimeter you can test the headlight, touching the common L+ with the red probe and the headlight L- with the black.  That should light the headlight, leaving the other two as the motor leads by elimination.

I also have the circuit board from a 2-10-2 and it has the same writing on the 6 pins.

I have a new 2-8-0 with Econami DCC/sound, the headlight initially was so dim you had to have a dark room to be surel the light was on. I replaced the LED with a larger, warm white surface mount LED and replaced the light tube and lens with a larger fiber optic strand and home made lens. That made things better but barely acceptable.  Recently I swapped tenders and decoders with a 4-6-0 that I had fitted with an ESU Loksound V5. That 4-6-0 initially had a dim amber LED out of the box with it's OEM Bachmann non-sound DCC decoder which I replaced with the ESU. I changed the LED to a warm white and it was very bright with the ESU decoder.

I did this decoder exchange as the 2-8-0 Connie is a much better model that deserves a better decoder than an Econami. Out of all 16 Econami whistles, only one was not grating/jarring to my ears and the slow speed response was OK but not great.

To my surprise, the tender/decoder "swap" (really not a swap, a lot of black wire identification, desoldering and resoldering) resulted in an extremely bright headlight on the 2-8-0, so much so that I had to turn down the intensity using programming. 

OTOH, the tender with the Soundtraxx/Econami and Bachmann electronic board that came with the 2-8-0 and now was grafted on the 4-6-0 caused the formerly bright headlight to go very dim, as bad as it was out of the box. 

So it would appear that the PC board to which Bachmann's DCC decoders and Econami decoders are the culprit. Someone has decided that dim headlights are a good thing apparently, or more likely, no thought at all was given and somewhere on that board are very high resistance values in the lighting circuit for no good reason.

Not a problem if you are ripping out the whole shebang including the stock speaker to put in an ESU or other high quality sound decoder but disappointing otherwise. Paying a premium price for a downgraded Soundtraxx decoder also gets you very dim lighting to boot.   

I don't know if the 2-8-0 has a coreless motor like the 4-6-0 but it runs much more smoothly with the Loksound than with the Econami. And the 4-6-0 runs justs as well with the Econami as it did with the Loksound, probably because of that coreless motor.

I am disappointed with the business model that Bachmann (and BLI also) has chosen, ie. you get their product only with DCC/sound and it is not a high-end sound decoder but you do pay a high-end price for it. I imagine that 95%+ of N scalers are happy enough so there is no pressure to change this practice.

Well, I don't have an EM-1 but almost every one of my Bachmann steamers have had wheels out of gauge. My DCC/sound 2-8-0 had the pilot truck wheels and the rearmost driver too narrow. Both of my 4-6-0's had tender trucks with wheels too narrow. My 2-10-2 is OK so far but I just read the Spookshow review where he demoted the engine from an A to a D based on drivers slipping out of quarter.  I had so much trouble removing the wheelsets from the tender trucks because of the length of the axle points that I snapped off a truck sideframe and had to order a replacement.  Even a small degree of out of gauge can cause either binding or picking frogs/points.  I wonder how wheelsets are gauged at the factory, is there an automated hands-free process, or does some person actually adjust each set individually?  Given the cost of these engines, having to deal with these issues is very disappointing and frustrating, certainly makes me reluctant to add to the roster.

Until recently, all I had was a test loop of Kato Unitrack set up on a table.  Now I have an actual layout although under construction.  It has Code 40 rail on cork roadbed on plywood. The turnouts are handlaid, most of the track is ME flex.  Although wheels hitting the flextrack molded in spike heads could be partly to blame, that produces a distinct sound (Atlas engines, even the most recent, have the biggest flanges and are the worst for this) and this is different. I think the glued down track is transmitting any mechanical noise very efficiently throught the cork and  plywood.  I was initially thinking of putting down 1" foam on the plywood which I had done on previous layouts but didn't do here.  Most people would say foam makes for more rather than less noise.  Still, some engines are more inherently noisy than others.  It's really not that bad, I'm, being picky.

Nonetheless,  troubleshooting a steam engine is probably not in my wheelhouse. I tried to de-wobble one of my 4-6-0s and after having the thing almost fall apart on the bench, managed to re-quarter it the way it was, with still a bit of wobble but not worse at least!

Hey thanks for letting me know! I suspected it was just the way it's gonna be with Bachmann. My 10 wheelers wobble but are very quiet and smooth, the 2-10-2 does make some gear noise but no grinding and a slightly jerky motion even with the Loksound DCC, the BLI Mike makes some mechanism noise but OK, fair running quality.  The 2-8-0 fits right in there with the rest as imperfect but acceptable in it's own way.

I have an N scale 2-8-0 Consolidation with Soundtraxx Econami bought earlier this year before all this pandemic business. Haven't run it for a few months and recently fired it up on a section of a new layout I'm building. I am noticing that it makes a definite coffee-grinder mechanism noise which, while not really loud, can still be heard above the sound effects.  It starts at speed step 1 and if anything gets less noisy as the speed increases but maybe that's just my imagination. 

I am fairly new to steam and have two Bachmann ten wheelers with DCC (one with ESU Loksound which I installed), a 2-10-2 with Loksound I also installed and a BLI Mike with their factory DCC/sound.  I mean all have some minor issues, but not this type of grinding sound. Is this to be expected for this particular engine?  I think I can live with it just comes with the design. I am used to silent Kato diesel mechanisms!

Also notice that with some of the Bachmann locos, there will be pilot truck or tender truck wheels that may not be in precise gauge (always narrow) and for my homemade turnouts built using Fast Tracks templates and to NMRA standards, even a slight narrowness of gauge can cause binding through the frog area which are built tight to spec. I widened the pilot wheel gauge of the Connie to exact NMRA spec and cured a slight hop through one of my curved turnouts. Fortunately, the drivers have been OK.

Well I couldn't stop myself from carrying on with this engine as it is a very nice running and well detailed model. Although I am most familiar with ESU Loksound, I was able to get this engine running very smoothly after playing around with the BEMF settings.  I was not impressed with the sound produced by the cheap round speaker in the tender with very obvious audio clipping even with the sound turned way down.  Most steam sound is basically a form of white noise with the various hisses and chuffs so it's hard to hear clipping but the whistles are musical and they sound like crap with this speaker.

Using a Dremel cutting bit, the speaker opening was enlarged slightly and a 9x16mm cell-phone type speaker (available from Digikey), 3.5mm thickness fit in perfectly in terms of depth.  Small pieces of styrene and Microscale Krystal Clear were used to seal the speaker in place with the whole tender as the enclosure. No modification to any of the tender electronics was needed. Very easy to do actually.

The sound volume was very similar and quite loud (I have master volume at 40% and most individual sounds at 50% of default) and the non "musical" sounds were fairly similar although the chuffs seemed brighter and sharper.  However, the whistles were greatly improved, actually sounded like the demos from HO scale engine with this decoder.

So, I would say to Bachmann, for likely less than $5, this engine could have had: 1. a bright headlight 2. much better sound 3. a better reputation for both Bachmann and Soundtraxx.   I hope someone from Bachmann reads this.

I realize very few modellers are going to take their steam engine's electronics apart to remove and replace LEDs and resistors. I guess I would just like to hear Bachmann explain their thinking in making the choices they did to end up with such an unsatisfactory headlight when other steam engines they made years before were so much better.  One thing I can see is they used a much thinner fiber optic strand or light pipe coming through the front of the boiler going into the headlight casting. That is why when you look at the light it seems to be coming from a small pinpoint deep within the casting.

There is one thing that you can try that is fairly easy and makes a difference. I used a tiny drop of UV curable "glue" like Bondic to make a small convexity on the face of the headlight lens piece (mine popped out spontaneously while running and I just happened to notice it-lucky 'cause otherwise it would have been lost).  Pry it gently out with a fine #ll blade tip. Hold the lens piece with a very fine tweezer up so that the front face is horizontal, put a drop of the UV glue on it and let it form a little, almost hemispherical bubble, then fix it with the UV light. When you put it back into the black headlight casting, the light will now fill the entire headlight instead of coming from a pinpoint.  Looks way better. 

If your lens doesn't want to come out, just pick up the whole engine, hold it vertical and do the same thing. Just need a teeny drop.

Am I the only one or does the N scale 2-8-0 with Soundtraxx Econami have an extremely dim headlight? Mine is so dim you can barely tell it is on and it is orange in color. My older 2-10-2 has a similar headlight design but it is MUCH brighter and golden white!

Can Bachmann explain why the change in design for a newer release engine that has resulted in such a poor result?

I removed the boiler shell and tender shell, found a tiny chip on the front PC board not very close to the light gathering pipe that goes out through the boiler front to the headlight housing.  I removed it and attached magnet wire to the leads and glued a larger golden white LED to the front of the boiler casting.  I checked the tender's PC board and found two 220,000 ohm resistors on the light circuit--that is really strange as most LEDs use around 1000-10000 ohms.  I removed those and replaced them with a pair of 1500 ohm SMD resistors. Now the headlight is much brighter and a more appropriate color. But still not right, the light tube seems to be very thin and ends too far from the face of the light.  So I'm still not happy and it was a lot of finicky work that shouldn't have been needed.

BTW I also improved the speaker response by filling in the large opening in the front of the tender with black styrene and closing the hole where the engine wires enter the tender with a piece of soft black foam cut from the piece that came with the engine in the cab as it was shipped in the box.  This seems to have sealed up the enclosure enough to make the sound louder and richer.