I was at a train sale over the weekend and as I was standing in line to checkout, this MTH PS2 Pittsburgh & Lake Erie SW1500 switcher was sitting on the table with a sticker on it that said “PS2!!  $99”.  It was all dusty and the handrails were bent, but I’ve been looking for a command switcher and thought how bad could it be for $99?

Since this was a 2003 engine, I installed a BCR battery replacement right away. I had to drop the circuit board inside (and a set of trucks in the process) to get to the battery compartment, so while I was in there I lubed the worm gears and lubed everything up.  I think it only had a couple hundred scale miles on it.  I cleaned up the shell and set up all the electronics.

It’s a great runner, running consistently without jitter at 1 smph when pulling a consist! One thing it doesn’t do well is sound – the speaker is small and gets easily overpowered and distorted. Keeping the volume low is the key, and for yard work it should be nice. One other thing I noticed is since it is short in length, it seemed to have trouble going over some of my switches at slow speed.

For $99, it was a good buy and cleaned up nice.