Awesome layout👍 I enjoyed this video a lot. I like the locomotives & rolling stock. They are much more realistic than the short🚌cars that you see everywhere. I'm just starting my G scale collection of track for my yard. You have some good idea's that I will be using. Thank you for sharing your video with us. 🚂🚃🚃🚃🚃
Union Pacific wanted to be paid more "Royalties" for using their name which is why that particular cost more that the others. So I think it was a market decision that no one would pay more for one road name than the others.
I just noticed this question... the answer is that these locomotives are not using Phoenix sound, they each have QSI decoders which are highly customizable. The sound also varies by load on the motors (using back EMF), so the sound changes as they go uphill or downhill (coasting). With Phoenix the sound varies only by voltage which isn't the same as load, or with a chuff cam synchronized to speed, but that's also not as realistic as syncing to the actual load. Other modern DCC decoders have similar functionality, such as Zimo and ESU.