I have a consist made up of 4 GE Evos with the charging lights. It runs great except when I turn the smoke on. It stops, the red light on my Z4000 flashes, the volts drop from 18 down to 13-14, & the amps go up from about 5 to 8-9. Are the 4 smoke units to much for the transformer? All smoke units run fine individually.
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That's probably it. Four smoke units can pull a lot of amps.
I've heard of instances of the same issue with the old Proto 1 Pennsy centipedes. Each A unit had 2 smokers and some people were having breakers tripping or transformers shutting down when all four smoke units were turned on.
Try running two or three smokers so you can know how much current multiple smokers draw.
Prolly one bad smoke unit, if you draw too much the Z4000 will just shut down the output
It's probably more than the smoke units, the VL-BB has four smoke units. With all of them running, it pulls a bit over four amps.
Remember, you also have eight motors pulling power with those four Evos. Even though the prototype is supposed to be power efficient, the model probably not so much. 
I have a consist made up of 4 GE Evos with the charging lights. It runs great except when I turn the smoke on. It stops, the red light on my Z4000 flashes, the volts drop from 18 down to 13-14, & the amps go up from about 5 to 8-9. Are the 4 smoke units to much for the transformer? All smoke units run fine individually.
Place each separately with smoke on and running in forward and measure amps. Add the 4 and see where your at. With all the lighting effects (unless these are PS-3) you might be at 7-8 amps moving. So depending on load and anything else powered by that output may just be pushing you over the limit. G
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