Model Railroading > Walthers GP 9 with chop nose

I just found out, that walthers low nose GP 9 has come into
the market.
Does any body know of a review, to what improvment
has been made to this model ??????????

Thanks 

Walthers makes two versions of the chopped nose GP9's as I don't think they've done a Proto GP9 in chopped nose yet. The older Trainline GP9's have been around for a long time. While the drive is decent, the detail is lousy. I somewhat fixed up a pair of St Maries River RR units since no decals are made for these locomotive and I got both for $35. The Walthers Mainline version have excellent drives with helical cut gears and good motors, and the detail is ok but really only a starting point for detailing. The sound units have ESU sound, but with one major drawback. They used a stripped down ESU decoder that cannot be wired with a ESU Powerpack. I would not buy the Walthers sound unit again, but install a ESU v5 decoder with Powerpak to keep the sound from cutting out on dirty track.I bought a pair of MRL Mainline GP9's a few years ago.

Ted Curphey
Ontario, OR

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The Walthers Trainline GP9 chopped nose unit is the X-Cox geep, based on the Athearn Blue Box geep.    The Walthers Mainline GP9 is just the old P2K tooling with fewer added details, hence the low  nose version there.   The Trainline drive is basic nothing special.  BUT, Mainline models all have the Walthers Hellical Gear Drive which is one of the best drives made today.     As for factory installed sound systems, as one of my buddies puts it ESU light, or Tsuanmi light, as in light beer.   None of them have all the functions available that a new sound board sold direct by ESU or Soundtrax and NONE have particularly good speakers, for that you need to at least go to Scale Sound Systems.   I almost NEVER buy a model with factory sound because of this.    The only factory sound units I bought in the last year or so were the ALCO HH660 and S4 switchers from Atlas, and that was to avoid having to figure out how to cram it all in myself, but they still NEED Scale Sound speakers which he has available for those units.

from where I'm sitting (at my desk), these look sharp. Especially the MRL units.

ATSFSuperCap Wrote:
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> The Walthers Trainline GP9 chopped nose unit is
> the X-Cox geep, based on the Athearn Blue Box
> geep.    The Walthers Mainline GP9 is just the
> old P2K tooling with fewer added details, hence
> the low  nose version there.   The Trainline
> drive is basic nothing special.  BUT, Mainline
> models all have the Walthers Hellical Gear Drive
> which is one of the best drives made today.   
>  As for factory installed sound systems, as one
> of my buddies puts it ESU light, or Tsuanmi light,
> as in light beer.   None of them have all the
> functions available that a new sound board sold
> direct by ESU or Soundtrax and NONE have
> particularly good speakers, for that you need to
> at least go to Scale Sound Systems.   I almost
> NEVER buy a model with factory sound because of
> this.    The only factory sound units I bought
> in the last year or so were the ALCO HH660 and S4
> switchers from Atlas, and that was to avoid having
> to figure out how to cram it all in myself, but
> they still NEED Scale Sound speakers which he has
> available for those units.

The Mainline GP9 is not the old Proto tooling. 

Very little original proto tooling is still used.  Almost all of it has been upgraded across the board.