Just added a YouTube video at the bottom of the narrative.
Here are some photos of the Sunset 3rd Rail Burlington E8A engineering prototype. First look for many of you. Some of you may have seen it up close and in person at the March Meet. Scott displayed it there and then sent it to me for an overall evaluation and especially DCC operation evaluation prior to putting it into production.
I hope to do a video shortly. (Added) In the meantime I found it to run very smoothly starting with speed step 1 and throughout the speed range. This with my NCE wireless cab set to 128 speed steps. Same for the test cab in CV Manager.
While sound is subjective and in the ears of the beholder, I found the sound to be the best yet. It comes loaded with the latest QSI Q3 version firmware with QSI's best yet sound file. Equally important it has two large speakers with enclosures mounted to the chassis with a gasket between and radiating down out of the chassis. Each speaker is on a separate 2 watt channel each of which can be manipulated with what amounts to a recording studio like sound board in CV Manager. I didn't need to do anything to this engine.
(For example, in some of my QSI equipped steam locomotives I installed a speaker with enclosure in the boiler and a larger speaker for more bass in the tender using the tender shell as the enclosure and then used the CV Mgr fade/equalization capability to move the sound toward the boiler with pretty good results. Sounds appear to come from about mid boiler while retaining a good amount of the bass response from the tender speaker.)
The E8A has all LED lighting. I always find the lights of new engines as delivered too bright so I adjusted them to suit my tastes easily with QSI CV Manager. And while at it set the Classification lights to toggle on and off with Controller function F12 as always on Class lights bug me. The engine cab light is on in neutral and goes off after about 8 seconds in forward and reverse. I toned it way down. I played with the rest of the up front lights and set them to my preferences. With the Automatic Multiple Lights feature activated four states can be set. Forward. Reverse. Neutral from Forward. Neutral from Reverse. For example I set the Mars light to be bright and oscillating in forward and dim an steady in the other three states. Coulda been off in some. Whatever, lots of combinations to play with. Headlight bright, dim, dim, dim.
As for looks. I personally really like the satin finish. It goes very well with my Atlas O California Zephyr cars. If I owned it first thing I'd do is cut off the air hose on the front Kadee coupler for sure. Then maybe paint/weather the coupler or replace it. Easy stuff.
As you can see from the pictures both trucks have pickups on both sides. It has a horizontal drive train with metallic U joints connected to the can motor with Sunset's belt driven Quiet Drive.
The internal wiring is absolutely the best yet from Sunset. Very neat and well stabilized with just one connector up front for all the lights and one at the rear for the magnetic reset reed relay. Makes it easy to separate the shell if ever needed.
Enjoy, Austin Bill
Here's a link to a YouTube video of the E8A in action. Once in YouTube be sure and select High Definition. The lights are actually set to a pleasing low intensity when seen running on the layout. They look way too bright in the video. Gotta work on that. You'll hear two different horns. Pressing F11 toggles between the two.
