So my order arrived yesterday, and my loop of track on a 3'x6' table is enough to hold the train and four GP40-2W's with a carlength or two to spare.
First impression is that the cars are beautiful representations of the prototype, which isn't a shock given how nice the pre-production cars looked. They run well and I only noticed the odd car that has a stiffly rolling wheel, and these can be corrected with a little massaging, and a few trucks were over-tightened and a little turning back on the screw joining the truck to the car solved that. The train rolls well as a unit and only at a very unrealistically high speed did one short barrel car reliably hop an axle (outer axle on the lead truck) off the track at a facing point switch, and it was the same car consistently doing so. At a lower speed this wasn't an issue, nor was it at a realistic operating speed. Not sure why it's doing that, trucks swivel freely and wheels roll well on this car.
The one issue is the couplers on a good number of cars don't exactly recognize center as a thing, so attempting to couple them together isn't something you can accomplish out of the box. Many require assistance to align the knuckles. This isn't doing to be a problem for the most part, being a unit train I don't suspect many will be switching the cars. If you do this will be a fairly annoying issue. I'm wondering if the car that likes to derail a high speed might be related to the misaligned coupler pulling to the side an causing the axles off? It's always the outer axle on the lead truck.
There's a fair amount of squealing from the trucks on the moving train, something I've noted on cars from Atlas and Trainworx in the past with factory metal wheels.
Overall on my loop they're performing well and it's hard to criticize Rapido on this one thus far. It's a very unique train to have offered in N scale and I thank Rapido for doing it. Modeling the general area where the prototype ran and in an era when it was running (last train was in 1989 iirc, and my era is 1987-89), it's kind of a must have... beyond being a very Canadian train from that wonderful era of great optimism and out of the box thinking that was Canadian railroading in the 1960's and 1970's.
