On Friday I popped into Lord & Butler in Cardiff and collected one of their limited edition versions of the Dapol Western. This is Western Invader, with no warning panel and yellow buffer beams, and my example has also been shop weathered by L&B. I also took home a decoder, but for now my model has been running in on DC.

I've seen some adverse criticism of the model, but overall I'm pretty happy with my example. It was certainly noisier than I anticipated, but after an hour's running in at moderate speeds in both directions, it seems to be quietening down. It's not "noisy" per se - compared to an old Hornby or Lima mechanism it's just not in the same league - but it's just not as spookily quiet as we've lately come to expect from Bachmann and Heljan's diesels. My Heljan 128 is astonishingly silent - in fact all you can hear is the click of the wheels over rail joints. My Dapol Western certainly runs smoothly and steadily, and I've tested it thoroughly on the layout without encountering a derailment. There might be the merest trace of wobble, but it's certainly not enough to bother me, and definitely a lot less obvious than my worst offender in this regard, a Bachmann 24 with a very eccentric wheelset.

It also looks like a Western, although - if I'm going to be honest - I was always perfectly satisfied with the Heljan version, and I'll still happily continue running my examples. But in the looks department, this is clearly the definitive model since there's really nothing to fault. Overall I like it a lot, but I hope the people out there who have problems with their models get their various issues sorted and that Dapol can tune out whatever niggles there may be in this initial production run.