Hi, Danny, and welcome to the forum.

It would help (me, at least) if you could give us the catalogue no. of the loco you are referring to.

Thanks.

You know, Danny, I suspected as much, so I went downstairs and checked the name of my spanking new 36243 loco and I am VERY embarrassed to say, it' the one I bought a very short while ago.

(These names do not mean anything to me, the catalogue no. does. But that is just me...)

This locomotive was the subject of a rather long discussion around the time that I bought it. Take a look at this discussion:

https://www.marklin-users.net/fo...want-to-buy-a-steam-loco

If you go to my post no. 43 you will see a video of the loco running that I think says it all: it's great.

Later on you may ALSO want to pay attention to the issue of the smoke unit.

You need to add a certain smoke unit but also modify the position of a cable so you can use function 1 to turn the smoke unit on and off. Just ask Mike, he did it for me a couple of weeks ago and now the loco smokes very nicely. The cost of doing so is not tremendous.

One warning: the loco runs SLOWLY. If you can live with that, it's a great loco. I absolutely LOVE the sound effects.

Hope this helps.

You are welcome, Danny. I trust you realize that the "older gentleman" is not Mike, but his father.

The Br24 would be classed as a 'mixed traffic' engine, its primary use would be branch lines so any mixture of freight and passenger wagons would be in a train.