The media could not be loaded. My biggest issue with this set is Lionel going back to the MPC era. Plastic body shell, plastic trucks and seemingly plastic gears that MAKE SO MUCH NOISE! Even with sound on, all you notice is the plastic gear grinding. DON'T USE GREASE to mitigate their penny pinching choice of using plastic/composite instead of brass gears! You'll gunk up the gears with hair and dust. You'll have to run the locomotive at a fast speed to drown the gear noise. It sounds that terrible. This will be my last LC / LC+. Going back to MTH (Mike's Train House) and the DCS controller. I can salvage the track and use this monstrosity of a noisemaker locomotive when the ambient sound drowns out the gears. I should've known better of this level of MPCness when I saw them change the packing from styrofoam to plastic. Positives: 1. LED lighting is awesome, with a very nice color temp of around 3000K, no ugly blue led lighting. 2. No issues with the track, nothing bent or out of shape, all the track connected perfectly. 3. Remote works well. Locomotive makes a very pleasant chirping sound when it can't detect the remote control letting you know it can't be controlled until you turn the controller on. 4. Included cars are of very decent quality with metal trucks. Don't forget to oil the trucks, something like Labelle no 7, plastic compatible oil and the joint where the trucks connect to the car, as they turn, and it's plastic on metal on some and others, it's plastic on plastic. The same goes for the locomotive, oil all moving parts, truck wheels, electric pickup side holders. The set comes un-oiled to prevent it from dripping everywhere. Other notes, no super capacitor, so when you turn on the power to the track, there's no shutdown sound of the locomotive that a large capacitor would have enough stored energy to quickly play shutdown sound. No flywheel, abrupt starts/stops most times. Non-magnetic dynamic brake on top, just a piece of plastic you can take off and on, easily knocked off when holding it naturally. I can see it's built to a price point not to include the other notes, but the gear noise is absolutely unacceptable. It's terrible. Sounds like cheap junk about to break. Put more effort into the starter locomotive, even if cost a few dollars more, just build it into the cost. Yes, it's not a Lionel Legacy or LC+ model, and nowhere near the quality of a MTH RailKing or Premier Locomotive, but still, at least make it usable without the noise racket from bad gears.
