Pierre,

you are fortunate enough to have one of my good Maerklin friends in your neighbourhood. I suggest you get in contact with Armando Garcia through the forum. He will be able to assist you locally as well as point you to available resources near you. The only dealer I know in the lone star state is AJCKids which is a bit far from Houston.

I think that both locomotives can probably be upgraded using one of the conversion kits from Maerklin. Most important will be changing the magnet and upgrading the motor from it's original set up to a 5 star high efficiency version. As far as Digital sound, my experience is that ESU offers better sound than Maerklin. I went out and bought a Lokprogrammer, which I use to modify decoder sounds for ESU and OEM ESU decoder locomotives. The recent Roco ones with Zimo are pretty impressive too, but I can't modify most of the settings with the ESU programmer. I have not experimented to see what I can change with my MS2.

See here: http://www.ajckids.com/TRAINS/MAIN.ASP?nr=92

Talk to Armando. I am sure that he can help and it's always good to know other modelers in your area.

Regards

Mike C