Finally had the opportunity to set up, run and inspect this engine in detail - and also put it alongside my Lionel AC-12 from 2005, which has TMCC and Railsounds 5.
To begin with, I can see why the color scheme, including whitewalls, silver painted ladders and so forth might offend the sensibilities of true SP believers:
But I love it - despite the fact that I am a newly converted rivet counter.
Yes, I have counted the rivets on the side of this model's tender and there are 946 of them (give or take a few).
More to the point, I have compared and contrasted the rivets on the Daylight's (4275's) tender and those on good old 4294's tender. The number of rivets per side is exactly equal but a shocking discrepancy has emerged: the Daylight is more accurate.
On close examination of 4294, including macro photography and enlargement in a photo application, it became obvious that rivet 368 is misplaced by approximately 2.25 scale inches:
Whereas on the Daylight, the corresponding rivet is perfectly and properly positioned; I have compared it carefully to contemporary photos of AC-12 tenders in freight AND passenger service to be sure:
All buyers of the Lionel Daylight AC-12 should take special pride in the accuracy of this model as well as its colourful beauty.
(P.S. Mine is all the more beautiful in that it worked right straight out of the box.)
P.P.S. The real reason I posted this was to mention something about the whistle smoke function, which could related to Alex M.'s previous deconstruction of a Legacy cab forward during which he found heat damage to one of the smoke unit impellers. That thread is here: https://ogrforum.com/t...-the-boiler-pictures
I notice that when I start up the beautiful one, there's a very distinct plume of smoke from the whistle outlet - even before the whistle is sounded. You can see it about 5-6 seconds into the video I'm attempting to post below (my first stab at this). It stops after a few seconds and afterwards the whistle functions as you'd expect.
I wondered if the plume is caused by the resistor/heating element on the whistle side of the smoke unit heating up rapidly without any fan running to cool it and then possibly being made to cool down by a temperature sensor in the unit. If so it might account for why there was a damaged impeller although it's difficult to see why the heat damage was only on one side.