i got some athearn sd70 and 75i that id liek to put on kato chassis, they are very noisy and dont perform well at all, i wont be buying any more of them in the future
the atlas and kato engines i have are by far better running
For what I have seen, yes, they are not as good runners as the Kato or the Atlas... or even the Intermountain!
I also bought an Athearn engine equipped with the TSUNAMI sound decoder. So far, I was not able to program anything into it. I am still running it under the 03 address...
I would say that the mechanic and chassis are "fake" copies of the older Atlas-Kato made of the early 90's...