The 2-8-8-4 ran perfect and continues to do so. The 4-8-4 had problems immediately out of the box. I ended up sending it in for repairs which was a smoke fan replacement. When it came back, there was a paint chip on the control access panel on top of the engine, but I digress.
When ever this engine was on a single track it operated and responded fine. As it approached multiple tracks, the headlite would flicker,the engine would stop running and fail to respond to any commands. After doing some research, with much help from the Legacy Forum, it was determined my layout was suffering from a ground plane problem. Evidently, the non-articulated engines have the problem fairly commonplace as the antennas are much shorter than articulated engines.
My DCS systems run flawlessly, there was no way I was going to run ground plane wire all over to accommodate this Legacy problem associated with these engines. My local hobby shop (Grand Central Limited) worked with me and I traded it in towards some new PS3 steam soon to be released (I hope!)
I just wanted to make others operating DCS aware of the Ground Plane problem should they be considering Legacy purchases. There is a lot of discussion on this topic in the forum, read up on it as I was quite surprised and very disappointed upon learning of this obvious R&D error by Lionel. Legacy is great, features are fabulous, AND they are quite expensive. Having to run ground plane wire is quite a chore and very disappointing for the price Lionel gets for this product.
I will stick with DCS, maybe I'll revisit the issue when I revamp my current layout