I received my BTO Lionel 2333592 Cotton Belt LEGACY GP20 #815 on Saturday. I took it out of the box immediately, and was very pleased with the level of detail on it, and also with the fact there were no broken pieces. I just got around to putting it on the track today. While I've purchased several NIB command and control engines since 2021, this is the first one that has been built since 2008 or so. I was totally impressed with how well it moved gracefully at slow speeds. It looked cool going around my 8' test oval. It was quite responsive to my CAB1-L/Base1-L system. I haven't tried the smoke unit yet though.
My one concern is apparent in the short video below. Note the flickering of the light on the top front of the engine between the number boards. No other lights seem to flicker. When I change direction, the lights on the back of the engine do not flicker, and of course that light goes off. The power is coming from a refurbished ZW, the power applied to the track is constant, and nothing else was drawing power from that transformer.
So, is this flickering an attempt to mimic the lights on train that I've seen move side to side? My guess is no. I'm guessing there's a bad connection somewhere. Based on other threads I've seen, I have some concern about sending it in to Lionel for a fix and getting back something that may have more problems.
Any suggestions?
