Layout #2, Video #36, Kato's Amtrak Pacific Surfliner 8 car set

This is our 101st video documenting our exploration of the model railroading hobby. It is the 36th video for our second (N Scale) layout. In this video, we introduce the Kato model of the Amtrak Pacific Surfliner train set. The set comes with one SC-44 Charger locomotive and seven passenger cars. Six of the cars have the Pacific Surfliner paint scheme, but one is in standard Amtrak Phase VI paint. The set came as the bare DC set. We found the set Dibble's, our local hobby shop, and when they looked, Kato was offering a set with DCC, Sound, and lights in the passenger cars but it appears to have been sold out as soon as it was announced. So, against Chris's better judgement, we had Mike at Dibble's install DCC, sound, and lights into this set. This took a while and was a little more complex than we first expected. In DC, the locomotive worked properly but when we installed the DCC decoder, we found that the LEDs in the locomotive did not line up quite right with the pipes used to carry the light to the front of the body. We also found that the lights were controlled by a second small dedicated function decoder in the locomotive. It took two decoders, plus an auxiliary light kit to get the locomotive working. The tail car also uses a small dedicated decoder to control the reverse headlight/red tail lights to coordinate the lights with which direction you are going. I like the set now, but we are going to be working on improving the headlights still. We also tried to install a set of lights in our older Milwaukee Road Olympic Hiawatha set. We could not get the body to sit right with the diffuser in so right now it looks like there is a light in one end of each car and not in the while car.