Looks good, Al.

And thanks for taking me down memory lane, as this was the first loco I bought after returning to modelling (with the ligther blue Lima livery). The body was much better than the Hornby version back then (some parts of it still are?), although of course with your mods it looks a thousand times better.

Looks great Barry - apart from the weird colour of course although in fact that looks quite good on that loco so some salvation there. As a modelling exercise I think it's a tremendous idea and I've always thought that Lima did a much better job than Hornby in 'catching' the appearance of the 'King' and your attention to it has made it distinctly better than passable judging by the pics.

Nice work, Al.

The new chassis is excellent and the rest of it looks brilliant as well. Presumably the old Lima body was basically correct, dimensionally?

Thanks for the kind comments. There must be thousands of these Lima Kings still knocking about - I wonder how many still run? Mine used to be quite smooth and quiet on a good day, but after I got my trains out of storage after a decade or so in storage it would never run well.

CK - I've not put it on a drawing, but I don't think there's anything too amiss with the Lima body. All I did was hack off as much of the moulded detail as I could reasonably manage.

I'm going to have a look at two Hornby Kings soon, to see what can be done to tart them up a bit. I doubt that we'll get a top-spec plastic RTR King any time soon.

Lovely work Al, I really do like that livery. Just out of interest what is the haulage capacity like?

Regards,

Nick

I doubt that we'll get a top-spec plastic RTR King any time soon.

Lovely job BT.I wouldn't be surprised to see a new RTR version soon.Did you use the original bogie as Comet don't do one.I used a SEF whitemetal one on mine.Still isn't finished.

Nick - I haven't tested the haulage thoroughly - at the moment it's got 4 Hawksworths and a parcels van on, but that's not its limit. I'll whack on a few more coaches tonight. It's quite heavily weighted so should be OK.

Gwrrob - it's the Lima bogie, yes. I filled it with lead, bodged a way to fit Gibson axles to it, and adjusted the mounting point so that it could be used with the Comet chassis. A small piece of bent brass strip provides some down-force to keep the bogie on the rails.

I used to have endless problems with bogies and pony trucks derailing on my old layout, but since I built the new one everything just seems to run without problems. It's either the transition to Code 75 being a bit more forgiving of finer wheel profiles or my track laying is a bit better, or some combination of the two. My curves are a lot gentler too which probably helps.

Cheers Barry, I've got a couple of Kings that I would like to convert over to P4 one day and this is really helpful.

Regards,

Nick.

I loaded it up with eight coaches, mixture of Hornby and Bachmann, and it coped easily - could probably pull a few more, I think, but 6 or 7 is the limit for my storage loops.

Make that nine, I can't count.

Looks great, thanks for sharing.