Polar Express Legacy Berkshire

I have the LionChief PE and it routinely pulls 10 cars for extended periods on the club modular layout w/o any problems. If you can find/afford the legacy version, I'd say go for it. They are scarce. Otherwise the LionChief offering is a satisfactory alterative.

FWIW, there are three PE Legacy (tenders only) on eBay now. The cheapest is $610. You can buy a whole LionChief set for half of that.

The scale berk will dwarf the baby Madisons in every dimension especially height and width. 

I myself wouldn't do it.

In the end however, it's what works for you that counts.

I still have the original engine from my set bought 5 years ago now. It was manufactured in April 2011. It still runs like it came out of the box. The legacy is one of the few really expensive engines I would buy. I've just never seen pics of it compared with the O27 sized cars, just with the heavyweights and other scale trains next to it. 

By all means, get the scale Berk, if you like it. It's on my wishlist for when I have an extra $1,500 to spare. But you'll find you'll want to pull scale heavyweights behind it.

RICKA,

    If you want a scale engine to pull your traditional sized Polar Express passenger cars see if you can locate a Lionel Legacy Polar RR K4 #25. I saw a few at York for under $500.00. I bought one a few years ago and I painted it over to PRR colors. As it comes in Polar RR it is an attractive engine with great sounds, smoke and whistle smoke.

   They even made a conventional one which does not have whistle smoke but is still scale size. The K4 is a good size and can operate on 036 curves I believe where as the PE Berkshire is a large engine which I think needs 054 curves.

Good Luck

JohnB

I have both PE sets. I bought the first one and put an ERR cruise and sound upgrade in it but it looks odd with all my scale equipment so I bought the PE scale set from a forum member at a great price. The scale set is beautiful and loosk great on the layout. Running the cars nest to each other they look silly with the scale Berk.