I finally took my Surfliners around my layout. I want to put an ESU 58741 into the SC44 Charger loco, so that's going to have to stay in the case for a while. Fortunately I have an Athearn F59PHI ready to go with ESU Loksound, so that's been doing pulling (and pushing) duties.
I had some problem on downgrades in push mode - for some reason the Athearn F59 and the first car would uncouple, causing the rest of the train to roll down the grade at Shinkansen speeds. Ugh, not good. I inspected the coupler height and the F59PHI's coupler looked to be lightly higher than the Kato (the MTL coupler gauge confirmed it), but the difference in height isn't too extreme. I ended up swapping the stock Athearn coupler with an MTL 1015 and lo and behold, it grabbed onto the Kato coupler much better, problem solved.
There's a single-page instruction sheet included, but it only covers the consist order of the cars, the installation of the trip pins and the interior lighting (Kato doesn't even list the part number required (11-211)). But that's about it.
The cars look NICE. Of the 7 cars in the box set, in actuality, 5 of them are actual Surfliner cars - one is obviously a Superliner car, in Phase V striping, but the other is a Superliner in matching Surfliner paint (sans the "Surfliner" name). The actual Surfliner cars are easier to spot due to the fluting on their roofs (which Kato did real nicely). The Superliners have smooth roofs.
I would say that the MVP in the set is the cab car.
Here's the most awesome thing about the Kato Surfliner set - when run on standard DC power, the headlights and marker lights behave prototypically, direction-wise: Loco-forward, the Charger's head/ditch lights light up, and the cab car's red marker lights are lit (as well as the number boards, lit in warm white). Reverse direction, and the cab headlights light up (warm white) and the loco flips to red marker lights. WOW! Apparently, the lighting board on the Charger has separate SMD LEDs on the top and bottom, one lighting up the marker lights the other illuminating the red marker light pipe.
If you run DCC, the loco is self-explanatory. But the cab car will look like this, regardless of direction:
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You'll need Kato's FL-12 function decoder (the instructions that come with it are all in Japanese though - there's some YouTube videos that cover the proper install of an FL-12), which pops into a compartment underneath the cab car like this:
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You push it down while you slide it forward towards the cab end until it stops (I used a tweezer to slide it in):
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Now finally the cab car's lighting will function directionally. Just MU its address to the loco's (so far I've kept the default address to 03, but the cab car has a 4-digit road number so just program the address accordingly) and you're ready to roll.
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Although, the headlights are static (aside from F0 on/off). Curiosity got the best of me, so I dissected the cab car:
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Just as I thought; a single LED illuminating the head/ditchlights and a single LED lighting the marker lights. Like the SC-44 Charger's lighting board, there's separate top/bottom LEDs that light up different light pipes according to type.
A full view of the lighting board:
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And now for the Bad News: Unfortunately it looks like there's no provision for alternating ditch lights; the FL-12 decoder doesn't seem to have additional function outputs even if you
can hack the lighting board to wire in additional LEDs. So it seems the only way to go about having flashing ditch lights in the cab car is to have a DCC manufacturer hopefully come out with their version of the FL-12 with additional function outputs or some sort of 3rd-party lighting board/decoder combo for this thing.
