dantimmy's Blog

Dan. Its nice to see a Castle in 'Great Western' livery as Hornby seem a bit shy on doing this.I would fit etched plates myself and take that hideous front coupling off.You could make her better with a few tweaks.

your thinking along the same lines as me. After these pictures were taken the couplings were removed and I plan to add; lamp irons, a crew, cosmetic screw couplings, etched plates, fire irons and realistic coal for starters

It's quite clearly the old Castle tooling, as one would expect, but it is nice to see Hornby do a "GREAT <arms> WESTERN" livery.

 

It is interesting that Hornby do significantly more grouping liveries in their lower end offererings. This is very evident in the Railroad Range.

 

Roughly, Grouping v. Nationalization DC steam engine liveries are:

Railroad: ~13 v. 7 = 65% (not counting all the Holden tank etc variants)

Regular: 28 v. 45 = 38%

you have just highlighted one of my headaches. I am trying to base my future layout around 1934-1937 (give or take) this makes it hard to find RTR models in the correct livery Having said that, it is not completely impossible to re-raint

It's the same for me as I model LNER 1923 -1948 obviuosly I dont run the later LNER stuff with the earlier (unless no one is looking) and the amount of RTR stuff is quite small and the ones they do are either not available anymore/yet or Limited Editions.

Have started to detail 5029, etched plates went on this morning (first time i've done anything like that), hit a few snags but looking ok. New steam pipes, 'cosmetic' screw couplings and fire irons are due in the post. And I have a nice sack of real welsh coal to add to the tender.

 

That leaves; lamp, lamp irons, a crew and the cap detail to be painted. Have I missed anything?

Are the couplings replaceable with other Hornby couplings?

On the model they are NEM couplings