We recently bought a train set made by a renowned company and just couldn’t resist looking inside the locomotive. Although it did have an electronic decoder, the DCM motor was already available 35 (!) years ago. It is most likely that this motor is used due to financial constraints, because Märklin (as you probably guessed) also has a modern 5-pole motor as part of its range. Incidentally, they have recently introduced a brushless model. The...