The Train-45™ ... your new tone just pulled into the station!  

Perhaps some of the most famous amps from New Jersey (besides ours!) were the Linden Ampegs and the legendary Trainwreck amps made by Ken Fischer in Colonia, New Jersey. Ken Fischer was actually laughed at when he suggested a channel switching amp to owner Everett Hull at Ampeg! He eventually became legendary, by building a series of single channel non master volume amps under the Trainwreck name. Being from the N.Y., New Jersey area, I couldn’t help but see, hear and service my share of Trainwreck amps over the years. Although I’ve built a great reputation for channel switching amplifiers, I’ve never lost my love for a good grinding rock and roll amp. Give me a Les Paul, a couple of hot naked humbuckers, an AC/DC riff or two through a nice 412 cabinet and I can be quite the happy camper!

Well, when I started the development of the Lucky 7™, and Blackjack 21™, I wanted to make a series of single channel non master style amps with a more rock and roll attitude than our ODS and TDS amps. This new series of amps offers that rock and roll tone and attitude in varying power levels. All models share a similar “in your face” attitude, at different power levels. I felt a fitting top-model in the series would be a traditional “wreck-style” amp that had both the EL-34 power and attitude to drag off to a gig and shake some people up. An amp that was clean to mean from both the guitar volume control and your hands, a simple, short signal path for maximum speedy response and hand-to-speaker transfer, and just plain simple to “grab and go.” I took the basic 3-gain stage circuit topology of the original Express, had the correct power and output transformers designed, and added a few circuit twists of our own to the mixture.

I’ve always believed in audiophile style circuit techniques to bring out the best in any tube circuit. Guitar amps are no different. I started with an audiophile style high voltage storage system. Instead of using single large capacitors, I used a group of smaller capacitors in a bank. By using a bank of smaller capacitors ganged together to produce one large capacitance, you end up with a power supply that is both forceful yet agile. One that holds lots of energy for transients, yet can respond quickly to each and every note.

I then laid the amp out on a heavy fiberglass two-sided circuit board. The power and preamp tubes are off the board on premium grade sockets. I used extremely wide and heavy traces to emulate a hard wired amp. I made constant comparisons to both real Wrecks, many of the so-called Wreck-clones, and to my hard wired prototypes. I even used ground plane technology on the circuit board, which adds capacitance to select circuit traces like a wire would get from resting on a chassis. This warms up the tone, lowers noise, and keeps the circuits stable. I used single point star-type grounding to keep it ultra-quiet, and DC preamp tube filaments to wring the last ounce’s of noise out of it, (no matter who’s preamp tubes you use). Other than logically selecting the first preamp tube for lowest noise and crosstalk, the remaining preamp and driver tubes are non-critical. Like the high end ODS and TDS Fuchs™ amps it shares much of the same premium metal work including an aircraft grade aluminum chassis, and a cooling fan. By using many of the same components of our other products, we’ve kept this great tone affordable. The Train-45™ features a unique train logo with an LED “headlight”, which is super-bright and will never need replacement!

Specifications:
Cabinet: 10.5 deep, 8” tall, 18” wide.
Weight:  35 lbs
Cabinet Material: Pine
Covering: Tolex
Power tubes: 2 X EL-34/6CA7. (6V6’s may be used for reduced power)
Preamp tubes: 3 X 12AX7
Controls: 3-position brite switch brite/flat/dark. Gain, high, mid, low, presence.
Rear panel: IEC Detachable power cord, fuse holder, AC and Standby switches. 4, 8, 16-ohm outputs (one each).

Rated power: 35 watts clean 45 watts peak with EL-34/6CA7’s.
6v6’s provide approximately 22 watts of power.

Download our Train 45 Operations Manual in PDF form.

Price: (only available in a head at this time)
$1,999.00 suggested list price for tolex shell