Hi Pete
From experience I would recommend against them. I Imported an engine, 7 carriages and 4 of the bogie wagons to Australia, for much less than I would have paid at the time for any other brand. I love the rolling stock I got, but the engine is not something I would consider buying again.
Mine had one of the coupling rods put on upside down at the factory and the screws glued in and unmovable. The engine would lift off the track because of it striking the sleepers in that orientation and it took a lot of faffing around to fix it because of the difficulty in shifting the screws.
The radio control, out of the box, on mine was next to useless. Short range on both channels (less than thirty feet), and frequent skips and starts. It also had only two speeds; stop and go, with go being quite lacklustre. Other people have told me theirs had no issues so it could have just been mine. The built in sounds are appalling. Basically a few chuffs, then a whistle followed by a clanging bell. It was very grating and, though the controller has a button on it for activation, mine just started and stopped whenever it felt like it. Sometimes it would go through several repetitions and others it would just stop at random points during the playback.
It's fairly trivial to replace the electronics with a 2.4GHz R/C set up and an ESC which makes it quite controllable, however the choice of ESC is important as the motor emits noise on the lower frequency pulse widths used by the cheaper ones on ebay (which I found out the hard way). One minor niggle is that the lights, at front and back, are 1 white LED and 2 blue ones. A trivial thing to sort out, but the blue ones look ridiculous. It's easy to separate the body from the chassis however some awkward juggling is required since the wiring to the LED's and battery can make getting them apart quite difficult.
Externally it is reasonably good (although not a patch on the LGB version) and though I had concerns about the plastic wheels not wearing very well mine has been predominantly run around R1 curves and seems to have suffered no ill effects. The two pony trucks are light and flimsy and I have had to glue extra weights onto them as they did have a tendency to ride up and over the rail on metal track (no issues on plastic) on compound R1 curves. This has also helped with, but not eliminated, their desire to jump off the track when being run "wrong way" through sprung points on the straight. On the curved "wrong way" approach to a sprung point they generally ride up and over the switch rail, but I've never had them not return to the rails on the other side. On some Aristocraft R1 points I also found they had a desire not to follow the curve if the point was set for it, but the weights seem to have have fixed that too.
I purchased it as an experiment, and I'm not particularly happy with it (though I will repeat that I do like the carriages and wagons I got very much!). While it's been made okay with some fixes and modifications, I don't consider it to be, IMHO of course, to be money well spent.
Hope that's of some help to you!
-David Morris
