I bought a 2-6-6-2 from Star Hobbies (Annapolis) at the Greenbergs train Show in Timonium for the show special price of $125. It was defective (new in sealed box) with a driver wheel what would hop up at a certain spot in its rotation. Took it back and got another sealed box in exchange. That second locomotive worked great on 18 inch radius curves. Bought another weeks later at the store for the same price, so now I own 2. Don't have anything set up to see it perform under stress, (long trains up grades), but one guy at the show who had purchased one said it was a great performer for him, 30 cars up 2% grade. My switching layout 2x8 has 15 inch radius sidings, so I will test it to see if it can handle extremely tight radiuses. I never planned to run the loco on those sidings, but now I will have to check it out completely and report back. I actually have used the loco in a practice session, and it worked fine, but it was too long for my sidings to fit on a lead track with 2 cars, so I had to scale down to one car at a time.
