Wrenn Pullman coaches

[simon b]

Hi all, 

 

I've seen a few of the old wrenn pullman coaches for sale in the blue and grey "Golden arrow" livery, I quite like the look of these for running behind my 71.

 

Obviously being 20+yrs old they are not going to be as accurate as the latest Hornby offerings, but how bad are they? Are the body shells reasonably correct in dimensions?, window placement?, ect, or are they more like the old Hornby "shortie" coaches?

 

Cheers, Simon.

[Il Grifone]

The Wrenn coaches are the old Hornby Dublo tooling from the early sixties. Designed to go around 15" radius curves, they are rather short, as already stated. Apart from this, they are rather nice models. Later Wrenn production has pin-point axles and are very free running. There are three different mouldings: a first, a second and a brake/2nd.

 

It's rather a question of price, as they fall into the 'collectible' category. 

[Vespa]

When Hornby Dublo brought the original Pullmans my mum and dad bought me Dorchester 34042 and the 3 Pullmans as a Christmas present. At the time they were highly rated in the model press.

[bennyboy]

If you want Pullmans in Blue Grey how about the Hornby trailers that are designed for the Brighton Belle? They may not be 100% accurate for the Golden Arrow train and obviously you'll need to remove 'Brighton Belle' from the sides, but they'll be more realistic than the old Wrenn coaches. Hattons have got some for a reasonable £30 each.

 

 

http://www.hattons.co.uk/35947/Hornby_R4527_Brighton_Belle_pullman_trailer_third_S285S_in_BR_blue_grey/StockDetail.aspx

[DCB]

The design is 50 years old Hornby Dublo and they went broke around 1965.   I'm not sure about being to scale but we have a rake of 7 (maybe 8 have to check) and they run beautifully on Peco code 100 track, much better than Hornby Hawkesworths, Bachmann, Lima etc, by some margin the best coaches we have, They run beautifully like all Hornby Dublo as they have metal bogies but significantly lighter than Hornby Dublo Tinplate so even modern locos can haul a reasonable train.  Ours were bought new from Hattons initially as odd coaches and then built into a complete set. If you want to run trains they are brilliant,  If you want a pullman or 10 for a diorama get a mortgage and buy new modern Hornby.

[naugytrax]

As already mentioned, the Dublo/Wrenn Pullmans are significantly under scale length. Visually, the bogies are also a bit off because they are are a standard Hornby-Dublo type as fitted to their LMS corridor coaches and therefore quite unlike Pullman bogies. The appearance of the coaches is improved by substituting bogies from the Hornby R223/R233 Pullmans, these bogies being also less than scale length and therefore a fairly good match. But many would say that these coaches are strictly "nostalgia" items (although not particularly "collectable" going by low eBay prices) and so they would not be worth fiddling with. Two of the three types can be used in a rather approximate 5-BEL.