A minor digression into drawbars, here.

Hornby's Rebuilt West Country/Battle of Britain models are nice products, with a couple of annoying quirks. The first and worst of these is that

they're prone to gear failures, at least the ones produced in the early batches. I ended up with three, and after a few years two of them were

both non-runners due to various issues. Hornby's repair department was no help at all, which I found very disappointing as they are by no means

old models, and the Rebuilts have been in the catalogue relatively recently.

Anyway, Ian at Redgate Models did a fine job with the models and while they were away I asked him to install sound as well. As a result I

got my two Bulleids back in fine working order.

The second quirk is less bothersome, but still annoying: the excessive loco-tender gap. See below:

This is hideous, and unnecessary. Hornby did a much better job with the earlier Bulleids, so why this ridiculous gap? I've no idea but it makes them look daft, in my view. The gap is at least a scale foot too wide.

I've tackled this in two ways. With the sound equipped locos, I didn't want to lose the extra pickup connections between the loco and tender, so I set about modifying the existing electrical drawbar. First, I unscrewed it, then unsoldered the two small wires which feed the two track polarities across the gap. By elongating the hole which the screw goes through, I was able to move the drawbar about 2mm nearer to the loco. I then made the hole round again by soldering a bit of scrap etch over it and filing it back to shape, effectively moving the hole. I had to nibble a bit away from the loco end of the drawbar for clearance. The connections were then re--soldered and the loco tested, and found to be all well. 

As shown below, the gap is now closed by about 2mm - small, but enough to make a difference.

I could probably get another mm or so out of it, but there's a complication here in that the sound in the tender needs an extra plug-in connection between loco and tender, for which the space is already tight. One possibility might be to substitute a slightly smaller plug but as it is, I feel that it's enough of improvement to be going on with.

With my first Bulleid, however, the one that never developed a fault, I was happy to lose the electrical connection and substitute a dummy drawbar from plastic:

This one has never given any trouble with pickup from just the loco alone, and with the gap closed by another 4mm, the relationship looks pretty close to photos. However, I'm not sure that the sound-fitted locos would be as reliable as they are without the extra pickups. 

The remaining loco will get the shortened drawbar treatment, and then I'll be allocating new names and numbers to two or three of these,

Thanks for reading!