Converting this wonderful engine turned out to be a pleasant surprise. The conversion was the easiest one I have done. The engine was definitely designed for DCC (the marketing hype was actually true). While not a plug-n-play conversion, it is rather straightforward. I have captured how to disassemble the tender and do the conversion on this page.

Tender Disassembly
All the work is done in the tender, so we will start with disassembling it first. Removing the tender body from the frame is very easy. On the bottom near the front are two small screws (indicated in the photo below). These need to be removed.



Flip the engine over and the tender body can be lifted up. It still clips on the back, but with a bit of wiggling it comes off.

The photo on the right shows the entire tender disassembled. The metal weight lifts off the tender frame. The wiring is now exposed. And this is where the easy part of the conversion starts. The wires have the same color as the DCC standard decoder wiring. It is a simple matter of soldering the same color wires together.

The DCC Conversion
As shown in the photo above, the wires are covered with black shrink tubing. Slip those off to reveal the wires. Unsolder the wires. To verify that everything indeed works as intended, I soldered the decoder to the wires and covered the exposed areas with new shrink tubing (as shown below). I then took the whole assembly to the layout and carefully tested whether or not the engine worked. It did!



My only concern was the headlight. It turns out that, unless you want control over the headlight (i.e ON or OFF), you're set. The headlight is ON automatically. It simply gets its electricity from the rails. The bulb is soldered to two contact strips that rub on the top of the flanges of the front drivers. I prefer to have the headlight on all the time, so there was no extra work for me to do. If headlight control is desired, then the white and blue wires of the decoder have to be routed through the drawbar and through the engine.

So, now that the conversion worked, I shortened the decoder wires as shown in the photo below.



I resoldered the wires, covered the joints with liquid electrical tape, and glued the decoder to the tender frame with Walthers Goo. After replacing the tender body, I tested the engine again. It worked fine. I programmed the decoder to work like a road switcher.