VL Challenger Tender Drawbar

here is a fairly BAD picture for reference on the drawbar issue.

Looks to me like the drawbar is bent downwards. It should stick out level with the rail head.

I had the same issue with my Vision Challenger.  Then I watched Eric Siegel's review of an engine with whistle steam and he made a point of pointing out that it does take a while to warm up.  That combined with using a bulb syring to blow a little puff of air down the stack helps.  If that doesnt work the little hose that connects from the smoke unit that drives smoke to the stack and whistle may have been jarred during shipment.  Are you getting any smoke build up under the shell? 

I have not noticed any buildup under the shell... but with the thick smoke coming from the stack, dynamo, and injectors all pouring out smoke its hard to tell where the smoke is coming from...i CAN tell you i left it on HIGH smoke long enough to smoke up my entire living room. and still got no whistle steam.....

For the whistle steam problem I would suggest turning off all the locomotive sounds so you can hear the smoke unit fan motor to see if it is working, take off the hatch on top of the boiler and switch off the main stack unit.

Then put your ear by the whistle and blow the whistle and see if you can at least hear the motor to see if it's running.

The new Legacy engines will display a blinking cab light code, 1 flash,3 flashes,ect to tell you that there is a problem and what it is, I don't know if this feature was in the Vision challengers, If it has it the flashes will tell you what the problem is, it will say in the back of the user manual.

I had this issue when I bought mine use something small and blow down the whistle hole and it will fix it. 

I had to use an airbrush to clear the plastic tubing on mine. From memory, there is one smoke unit primarily for the whistle steam and another for the main stack. I don't recall which one feeds the dynamo (I think it's the one for the whistle towards the middle of the boiler) but if you are getting smoke for everything but the whistle it's likely a connection problem.

it is right as pointed out above that the whistle steam on many of these models (a) takes a while to warm up and (b) doesn't actually produce a great volume of smoke. Mine never has operated as I have seen others' do and the maximum output is when the engine has been rolling for a while and is pulling a load.

Whatever you do don't take the boiler shell off and investigate - I did that and the result was to make things worse and cause a repair bill.