The first new locomotive I've bought this year has arrived: it's a Lionel 2133570, the Legacy SW8 in Boston and Maine "Bluebird" livery. I haven't seen a lot of reviews of this particular variant so I'm doing one for all of you. This is only the second Legacy engine that I have ever bought (most of my rolling stock is older MTH or Lionel TMCC) so I'm very excited to have it!
Here's the front of the locomotive. The raised number boards look pretty neat but they are unfortunately painted-on rather than illuminated. I'd love to add some operating ditch lights to them, although I'm not in a rush to open this pretty engine up. It's very nice just as it is!
Here's a look at the cab. Lots of nice detail here like the shades on the side windows, the wipers on the back of the cab and all of the little grabirons.
Here's the underside of the SW8. You can see that the couplers are body-mounted for a more prototypical look. This locomotive has an interesting horizontal drivetrain that I've never seen in a Lionel engine before-- one central motor powers both trucks through a driveshaft that runs along the frame.
Now, let's talk about the problems I had with my engine. The trucks are rather sloppily assembled. You can see that the pickup rollers are a little wonky-looking. They were bent at about a 30 degree angle fresh out of the box. The wheelsets have a lot of lateral play and the locomotive is prone to "hunting" on track switches. These two minor problems combined into a serious issue-- the locomotive would hunt on my tubular O72 track switches, swing the bent rollers against the switch frog and send up a shower of sparks as they arced! I ended up having to bend each of the pickup rollers a little with a pair of pliers so they would rest perpendicular on the center rail (you can see that the rollers are "straight" but the pickup arms are still a bit twisted). Thankfully, this seems to have resolved the arcing.
As for cosmetic defects, one of the number boards has a broken peg so it's a bit loose. This would be easy enough to fix with a touch of Loctite but other peg seems to hold it in place well enough so I've just left it alone for now.
I dug out this very special HO locomotive so I could tell you all a story about my family. This is an Athearn "Blue Box" SW series locomotive that my Dad painted and lettered himself thirty years ago. When I inherited his train collection as a little kid, this was my favorite HO locomotive since it ran well and had such a pleasing color scheme. I have been searching for an O Scale version of Dad's engine ever since I moved up from HO twelve years ago.
Here's a side-by-side of the two locomotives. I think Dad's engine is a SW7 instead of a SW8 but the likeness is still pretty close.
I put together a consist of all of my O Scale B&M freight cars for the official inaugural run. Dad's engine is coming along for the ride in the sturdy die-cast B&M gondola. On my layout it looks like somebody's half-scale garage build!
And here it is running around the layout! This is at about 1/3 full speed.
In this video you can see the locomotive "hunting" as it passes over this O72 tubular switch at about 2/3 full speed. This track switch is problematic since the layout table is a little warped underneath it.
Here's a video demonstrating both the low-speed crawl of this locomotive and the five horn sounds that can be selected by pressing "AUX1" and toggling through the rotation. The low speed performance is absolutely fantastic, this engine is the best crawler in my whole collection! I think this is why Lionel brought out the new drivetrain for this model, it really makes for nice slow speeds without sacrificing too much torque. The locomotive was pulling about 0.5-1.0A more than nominal drawing this freight train which includes 2 super-heavy die-cast hopper cars.
I hope you all found this informative!
