I've been having some fun with my new VOX Li'l Night Train. I traded an old Trace TA30 and a 60 pound Fishman - 280 watts of acoustic amps for ... a 2 watt tube amp. Kinda glad I did that. Why? I use it at home as a practice amp and our fish have stopped dying. I use it out gigging only as a preamp and drive the PA with it. It is three pounds of pretty good tone; my back is thanking me even now.
The Li'l Night Train might not end up being anyone's "favorite" amp under any circumstances. But it does have some very nice tone and is pretty versatile for my playing. I play with acoustic guitars, a Washburn J4 jazzbox and occasionally a Cort 335 clone. My guitar gigs - whenever I do get to play in the first place instead of running sound - call for backup and occasional clean leads with an occasional bluesy growl.
When used to drive its 10" Celestion speaker, the amp sounds warm and clear, but suffers from minimal (if any) headroom - after all it's only 2-3 watts on a good day. But it also has a headphone output through which it routes only a single watt. This one feature transforms the head into a great little preamp for my PA. When gigging, the PA gives me all the muscle I need - eliminating all the headroom issues.
I've used it with the Mackie SRM450s in my gigging system, and the other night four of us played a small dinner club using just my Passport 250 system, which I usually reserve for side fill stage monitoring as part of the main rig. Using only the Passport, we ran four vocal mics and my jazzbox guitar; two other members used their own amps. I had placed the head on top of a stack so I could see the controls easily and for the first time I felt in complete control of my guitar sound. Works slick - as long as I treat it as a preamp.
Next adventure will be using this as a front end for the recording rig. All kinds of possibilities pop up here... will report back.