Without going into endless detail I've purchased a Hornby Class 31 for the layout. The 31s were a familiar sight on my childhood commute, so along with my 37 something of a "must" for my layout.

My local model shop was offering them at £68 which seemed to be a good price. Sadly the first one I took home succommed to a problem that apparently has dogged Hornby - the cab floor at one end cracked and sheared off. So, back to the shop with that example. The replacement broke in a different place - when I fitted a decoder the pillars within the bodyshell that you screw into shattered. Only 1 of the 4 pillars / brass inserts survived one disassembly/re-assembly. So, that one went back. Finally the 3rd example that the shop supplied was ok.

The only residual issue to be sorted is to get the red LED directional lighting to work. To do this you need to take the model apart (hoping that it doesn't shatter), tease the copper tags out, and replace the bodyshell and screws. Do i really want to risk breaking the model after all the effort of getting a halfway decent example? Not quite yet.

In spite of the problems encountered so far, it is a nice model. And it's going to look the part pulling parcels trains around Highworth.

And scrolling back a few years to when RTR were a lot blander, if someone had said: "Hey, you CAN have a nicely detailed Class 31, but you might need to figure out how to fit the body to the chases", then many people might have thought this a reasonable proposition. After all we are modellers...

Of course, alongside highly detailed models we also need and expect similar standards on reliability and robustness. And I think that Hornby has some way to go on this.