At the San Leandro Historic Railway Society’s winter show I won a Kato NW2 switcher from the raffle.  I am happy to say that this model turned out pretty well, and runs nicely on DC.  Unfortunately is was very difficult to install the decoder for DCC in this model, as no room is available inside of the model.  I was forced to mill out a portion of the weight under the hood to allow enough room for a N scale decoder from NCE. On the plus side the Kadee couplers I used to replace the horn-hook style couplers included with the model slid right into the existing pockets once I assembled them.

Two different options for the exhaust stacks were included, indicating the phase one and phase two (as built).  The detail parts were crisply molded and easily installed, with only minor enlarging of a couple of holes.  The directions were very clear and used diagrams of both the model and the parts sprues indicating the location for each part.  For the smaller parts duplicates were included in case of damage.  The directions stated that these parts could be just snapped into place, however I used Zap-A-Gap to make sure they would not fall out.  The lights use yellow LED’s, which I admit look a little strange – and I will be changing them out eventually.

Other than the difficulty in installing a DCC decoder into this model I would have given it top marks.

• Overall: 7
• Provided parts: 10
• Instructions: 10
• Value for price: 7
• Overall quality: 8

I recently installed a DCC chip into a Kato NW2 switcher.  Due to the construction of the model I had to use a N scale decoder from NCC (this is the fourth chip I have used of theirs with excellent results so far).  This is not a project I would recommend for a first install as it required milling out a section of the frame in order to place the decoder.

Notice in this picture the two black lines on the frame, these are to show the lines I milled between to create room for the decoder.  Also look at the cab and notice the two brass tabs coming down at the back, these are pickups for the LED and had to be shortened in order to solder the wires from the decoder onto.  For the front LED I scraped the portion of printed circuit board from each lead and then soldered the decoder wires onto each side.  Note that the LED will not work if you get the wires onto the wrong one (something I figured out the hard way).

Here is the picture of the chip installed into the frame, with only the motor leads in place:

This picture shows the shell in place after the decoder has been installed, note that the leads for the rear LED have not been soldered to the tabs on  the cab, and also that I later moved the pick-up wires (red and black) down to the pickup for the trucks.

I was finally able to get the decoder to work correctly, along with both the front and rear LEDs.  This has been one of the most difficult decoder installs that I have done to date – and I welcome any questions about this install.  I will do a full review of the model once I have installed all of the detail parts on the model.