A Look At The ScaleTrains N Scale Tier 4 GEVO

One reason I've revived my interest in N scale is that new acquisitions take up far less space than HO, and a lifetime collection becomes slightly less unwieldy. Another is that if we have to downsize or relocate, I have a fallback. As a result, based on recent railfanning, I decided to double up on BNSF GEVOs, and I now have a ScaleTrains N version to match my HO:

The comparison is instructive. The details are carried out pretty equally on both locos. One slight puzzle is that ScaleTrains claims to use TruColor paint on its locos, but the shade of BNSF orange on the HO loco is somewhat darker than the shade on the N loco. This isn't bad; in my experience, colors vary with fading and weathering, and the N loco strikes me as a slightly faded BNSF orange, while the HO loco seems to have a newer verson of the paint.

All the grabs on the N loco are freestanding, in contrast to Kato N locos, where they are mostly cast on. The headlights and ditch lights are separately controllable, in contrast to Kato N locos, where headlight and ditch lights go on and off together. F5 on the ScaleTrains loco puts the headlights in DPU mode, where the single rear facing headlight is illuminated to the rear when the loco is operating on the rear of a train. However, as far as I can determine, the loco numberboards stay lit no matter what. There may be a function key that controls this, and I'll check with tech support to see if there is.

My loco has DCC installed, but not sound. The ESU decoder with the loco comes with a default acceleration-deceleration momentum set in CVs 3 and 4. I prefer not to have this extra momentum, so I simply reset CVs 3 and 4 to 0, which worked fine. The speed curve with the ScaleTrains loco is much slower than that on Kato N locos, but this can be adjusted to match speeds more closely.

ScaleTrains has had problematic couplers, and it seems like it has issued several updates to its couplers and revised the mounting to make MicroTrains couplers a drop in fit. Test runs so far, though, indicate that Kato factory couplers are not good matches for the ScaleTrains versions. Here's a side view of the loco:

The truck sideframe detail is very fine, and it includes the C4 A1A-A!A air cylinders on BNSF locos. The model also includes PTC antenna detail on the cab roof. Here's a prototype view: