I found a good deal on a Walthers American Crane in Missabe paint that arrived yesterday. It is the DC Powered model, and it is a very nice looking model, forgive the poor quality image cell phone picture. It also has a couple of copper supports to keep the rigging together in transit that you can see.
I do have one big concern about it, it is very loud. I ran it on my test track (aka the kid’s DC track loop) and it had the highest pitch wine. I had thought about doing DCC conversion with a small decoder like the TCS M series but now I’m not sure. I may fiddle with it to see if I can get the noise down. If not I’m just going to pull the motor out and make it unpowered it’s really just that bad. I hadn’t planned on doing much in terms of operations with it but it would have been nice to have it powered. I can just make any moves with it as a towed piece of equipment.
It also came with a couple hook replacements, one is an electro-magnet that I’ll probably keep on it.