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I only have four steamers right now. One Kato/GHQ, one Pacific Fast Mail, one Spectrum, and one Athearn. The one I've had the least trouble with has been the PFM model, only cause it only has about a dozen hours on it since I got it for my 19th birthday some time ago. My experience with spectrum has been fairly good. I have a post-war K4 pacific #3750, only cause I now live within 20 minutes of where it now stands. It runs quite well, not the best I've seen but it is fine. The biggest problem I've had with it, was that one time I was trying to run it on the local clubs layout and it wouldn't respond to the controller at all, I took the tender shell off, and a minute later of not responding to the DCC signal; I let the smoke out of the decoder! I have since learned that the RF Chokes on the circuit board can blow a decoder. Since then I've pulled out the entire circuit board, probably voiding the warrenty, and have hard wired another decoder. I have an Athearn Lite mike, and thats been a good model overall. I had to tune it a bit in order for it to run on the local clubs layout, which wasn't much to do, nothing nobody with basic skills can't handle. It doesn't pull a whole lot though, even after adding weight where ever I could to the model. About 25 cars, on the flat even, and it starts slipping. I haven't checked its performance on a grade yet. The spur gear stripped itself after only 6-months of running it, and accumulating 40 some hours on it. Athearn was really good about fixing the locomotive, they didn't even charge me for it! it took a friend of mine, a month to get his back. But it only took me 2-weeks from sending it off, to seeing it get delivered. A tip, when sending something off for warrenty work, send them a return shipping label. The Kato/GHQ is an N-scale Pennsylvania L1 mikado that I built with a Kato mikado chassis, and GHQ parts. Nicest running, and, almost, nicest looking, locomotive I have. It does run as good as it looks. And can it pull! 65+ cars when I put on a traction tire. Per advice from a friend of mine. That wasn't easy to build, but it was satisfying in the end when it was finished.
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