Another diversion from layout building and work on the G16 and 2 HAL. I looked at my Lima class 31, 31 327 in Railfreight grey and thought I would like to do something useful with it, as the 30/31 was a particularly good model from the Lima stable. Some years ago I fitted separate handrails to the front of my blue 31 004 and repainted the yellow ends completely. 31 327 had been languishing in a drawer because it had never had the side handrails which were supposed to be supplied in the box but weren't.

I decided to shave off the moulded on handrails at the front and drill the holes (#76 drill bit) before losing track of the correct positions for the handrail ends. Bending the handrails involved a small amount of trial and error. followed by gluing with superglue (cyano-acrylate). The door handrails were just as fiddly to get right, especially the ones with the bend at the top on the edges closest to the ends.

I partially repainted the yellow using slightly thinned Humbrol gloss yellow (#69). This should not have matched fully but blended with the slight weathering I had applied at some time previously and barely shows at all.

Flushed with that success, I decided to try it on analogue DC and it ran very sweetly, even without cleaning the wheels (I'm not a huge fan of Lima's running qualities but occasionally one could get a 'winner' that ran really well - both of my class 31s are in this category). I decided to try out a DCC conversion, using an old, sidelined Digitrax DH123 decoder, which has the advantages of 1. being expendable and 2. possessing a 9-pin JST connection from the wiring harness into the decoder, allowing me to replace it in the future with a better decoder. I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the running, even with this non-BEMF decoder, particularly in light of my previous poor experiences with Lima mechanisms on DCC, so much so that I will convert 31 004 as well in the near future.

Now all it needs is a little more judicious weathering and some etched nameplates and I'll be very happy with the result.