Piko 40200, N-Scale Talent 2 railcar

My collection of N-Scale rolling stock has been in desperate need of a modern looking railcar. I really wanted to buy one of the Kato's Shinkansens bullet trains but the company's dislike for full DCC support put me off that purchase. After further investigation it turned out a product from PIKO might be my best option.

PIKO makes several different models and configurations of modern railcars. They look really nice on the photos and are not terribly expensive. They are also advertised as upgradable with DCC and sound functions. That was all I cared about and I decided to go for a Bombardier Talent 2 model with four cars and a traditional Deutsche Bahn red painting: PIKO 40200.

The purchase was made with my favourite German store MSL and it cost me 177,99 €. The package arrived on a cold January day so I let the train warm up before running it. Unboxing of the sturdy but fully transparent plastic box revealed the full content:


We get the following:

• a four cars train split into two two-cars parts
• a set of assembly/disassembly manuals
• a set of couplers for multi-unit configuration

The two parts of the train can be joined together by simply pushing one part into another. It works well both when connecting and disconnecting. The critical parts here are however plastic, and I wonder how many cycles they can last.


Once assembled the train is 45 cm (~17 inches) long and looks really nice. The painting is great with nice colours and sharp details. And some of those details are really, really small, too. Body of the train has a simple "bullet" shape but there are a lot of extra elements visible around. Die-cast handrails at the driver's cabin, windscreen wipers, door shapes, etc. and a lot of separately applied parts on the roof. Bottom of the front car includes a speaker grill.


It's important to mention that the train features non-standard couplers. You cannot attach another N-scale model to it which of course makes perfect sense. Connecting two railcars however should work but owning only one I was not able to test such configuration.

A great thing about the model is that it features factory installed interior lighting. This looks as nice as expected. Here are some photos to prove it. They were taken after the DCC decoder was installed, as it is the only way to have the light on and the train standing still.


Talking about the DCC conversion. Installation of the decoder itself is incredibly easy. You open the roof part, remove the factory installed PCB-bridge and install the decoder. These steps are valid for the PIKO 46211 decoder I used, but I expect it to work the same way for any Plux12 decoder of compatible size.

Sound module installation is a different story and I will prepare a separate blog post to cover this topic.

So how does it run? Well, there are two aspects to consider here:

#1: straight track and wide curves. This is the area where the train performs very, very well. On a loop with 318 mm radius or wider curves it runs great and looks great. It's just as you would expect from a high speed train. Nothing bad to mention here, it's all just amazing.

#2: turnouts. Unfortunately this is were some issues show up. At first my newly bought train would derail almost every single time when passing my Kato turnouts. The only way not to derail was to go extremely slow. It would happen even when going in the "straight direction" of the turnout. I was wondering what was wrong and then I realized it was happening much more in one direction than the other. That was when I noticed this:

This is the connection between my middle cars. The one I had to make myself by pushing the cars into each other. Obviously it's far from perfect and one of the wheel axles even seems to be floating a little over the rail. I re-attached the cars several times - always with the same result.

The solution for me was in changing the order of the middle cars. This removed the very bad joint, however I feel the connections I have now are still not perfect. The train will still occasionally derail on a turnout unless I slow it down. This is acceptable for me, however being able to reliably run it at full speed in the "straight path" would be very cool, too.

Another small woe I have is that my unit seems to be missing a small portion of paint on one of the cars. Or actually it might be a "too much paint" case, too. It's not big and not critical but I wonder how it passed the quality control considering the fact that I noticed it even before opening the box. This is what it looks like:

Summary

I think it's time to summarize. I wanted a modern looking railcar and I got one. I love the look, love the features and plan to extend it further with sound module installation. I absolutely adore it when it runs well but I wonder whether it could be a little better whenever it derails. If I was going to give a numerical score, I'd rate my happiness at 75%.

Pros:

• fantastic look
• nice model details
• runs great on a a straight or wide curve track
• DCC/sound friendly
• reasonable price

Cons:

• imperfect car joints make the model derail occasionally
• small painting quality problems