Be great if Walthers made all the excursion cars exclusively. 207 208 2066 power generator cars. Kenefick Lonestar Shoshone Cheyenne St Louise business cars just to name a few. I had my BLi BigBoy 4014 pull a 74 car excursion train. I used 3 Proto 2000 E9 B-units as helpers. Your reviews are awesome.

Always liked your videos, and it’s also nice to hear your option about new. Locomotives such as with this one

Detailed review for a detailed model! I do agree that this is one of the best version of the Challenger. : ) subbed!

I have the later oil version and the early coal version. I love them. They are excellent runners.

+1000 on someone making the theater cars in plastic! I have pretty much the same excursion set you do, and have been waiting for the theater cars to come out. I have the new BLI Big Boy and was thinking about getting the Challenger, and your review has made me decide to go ahead and do it! Now, I wonder if they'll do the 844 too! Seeing an 844, 3985 and 4014 excursion triple header would be an awesome sight!

I’d love to hear more about your upgrade of the BLI sound board. Thanks for the review, I can’t believe how quiet this engine was.

Great video like always

super model , your video makes me wish i had ordered one.

Mine has the ticking sound as well.Great loco.

Matt, If you go to CV 232 you can adjust the Idle smoke rate/intensity... factory value is 8. A value of 11 to 15 will have it smoking nicely while sitting still. Nice video... Neil

and i will stick around and watch more .. so thank you

You looking at 2 different models from 2 different makers and 2 different eras of 3985. She has changed over the years and when tge next version comes out and when she hits the rails again she will look different.

Nice its very cool. I was thinking of getting that loco, but instead i got the j class #613 because ive seen alot of reviews on that one and this just came a little while ago and hadnt seen many reviews. But still its pretty cool

Great and detailed review. Thanks for sharing. Is it possible to program the decoder to make the locomotive start even more smoothly and run slower at speed step 1? I recently bought a few locomotives from Roco with ZIMO decoders, and by setting the CV value for starting speed = 1, the locomotive starts so slowly, it is almost not possible to see it is moving.

I only recently started collecting ho after years of buying Lionel. I dont know if you know this or not. But bob gruba who started broadway limited was Lionel trains director in the 90’s. He was responsible for most of lionels cutting innovations that brought Lionel up from their low. If you ever bought any of lionels legacy, jlc or vision engines you can see those features on A lot of Broadways engines today that once started out on Lionel trains. I would love to see broadway make a genset with operating exhaust stacks just like lionel has.

I have a similar challenger but in the D&RGW livery. I am a little worried that if i run it at high speed the sound might get destroyed or messed up.

hey matt I got my BLI light Mikado my in the Union pacific cab number 2482

Where can I find it as well as the water tenders and the excursion cars both walthers and brass

Great engines. Really enjoyed this video. I Love large steam locomotives. But I thought the whistle sounded odd. I'm also ignorant of what a challenger whistle actually sounds like in real life so it could be very realistic for hat engine. But If the whistle sound is not realistic for that engine, then My other questions are: Will the whistle sound different when it is used for a while or is it just that the audio in this video doesn't accurately reflect the true sound heard in the room.

Builders plate is on smokebox.

Smoke is only a means of putting mineral oil vapor all over your track. If there's no way built in to kill the smoke, a wire cutter does it nicely. BLI gives you a switch under the cab to turn it off, most others, you have to disconnect them.

Great looking engine. The smoke feature is nice, too. But, I'd like the see these HO scale steam engines blowing simulated steam from the base of their steam chests just like the real thing. I think that would look great, and realistic, too. If BLI can have their HO steam Locos blow smoke from their smoke stacks, why not have them blow steam from their steam chest as well?

W.O.W.

very nice loco, have you ever thought about to check out the TRIX Challenger? It is a high quality loco with ESU Loksound. I own a TRIX Big Boy and this is a realy fantastic loco all diecast metal and fantastic details. Not to forget the smooth running.

If you convert it to a tsunami I’d be really interested in watching that video, I’m not a big fan of the sound file either. I have BLI E7 A & B units that were equipped with QSI decoders 🤮 I couldn’t change them out with tsunamis fast enough.

Where do you add the liquid to make the train smoke? Inside the two holes at the front of the train?

Work on any sound upgrades yet?

I am really curious about why Bli Challenger able to share almost the same tooling with Trix version, the detail are 99% the same, except the Bli uses plastic gears while Trix uses metal and brass. I am little worry about if it easily get stripped thread and difficult to replace it.

Definitely a nice model, but the smoke is really not realistic; it looks like cigarette smoke. Anyway, a worthwhile purchase.

5:51 how did you quill the whistle

Mth has the best smoke units on ho.. Broadway smoke units are junk..they leak smoke on the inside of the boiler and lays on the engine circuit board and blows out your decoders..had this problem in 8 of my Broadway engine and each one blew out the decoder twise ...

If you sell the Lionel one, I'll take it!

I wonder why nobody reads the MANUAL on how to set up the output of the smoke unit...if you're going to "REVIEW" a product, shouldn't you know how to OPERATE IT??🤔

For God sake, STOP pushing your engines around during the video! It is NEVER ok to slide engines on they're drivers unless it loses track power.