OO Class 08 Buying Advice?

[The Johnster]

Worth a mention; Roco (I think) do a Dutch 08 in H0.  

[Steamport Southport]

4 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

Worth a mention; Roco (I think) do a Dutch 08 in H0.  

 

Ah. But the thread title specifically mentions OO....

 

 

I also think the Dutch English Electrics were different. There's some at Ribble and I think they are more like a Class 11.

 

 

Jason

Edited August 13, 2020 by Steamport Southport

[Barclay]

49 minutes ago, Steamport Southport said:

 

Ah. But the thread title specifically mentions OO....

 

 

I also think the Dutch English Electrics were different. There's some at Ribble and I think they are more like a Class 11.

 

 

Jason

Yes they were basically the LMS design which had smaller wheels and a different cab roof profile.

[cypherman]

Hi all,

I concur with The Johnster about the Wrenn/HD 08. I have 2 and they can be made to be very good shunting engines. They can be controlled down to a scale crawl as long as your track is clean and they can easily pull a rake of 8 coaches for shunting. I know they have no possibility of cab detail, You can use slightly tinted glass in the cab to help hide the motor and you can improve the body/chassis detail to make the engine more realistic. Plus in my opinion I feel they have something that the other engines do not have. A presence on the line. A feeling of being solid and powerful.

[The Johnster]

AFAIK they are pretty good as regards scale as well, and are a delight to shunt with.  Not only can they be controlled down to a sub-walking pace crawl, they have a slight 'flywheel effect' overrun which you can develop with practice into perfect buffer-kissing.  The 'presence' is less clearly definable, but is certainly there, in precisely the way that the Lima's isn't. 

 

Agreed the windows could be tinted or 'steamed up'; my major grouse apart from the motor-filled cab is the crude overscale connecting rods.  It might be possible to replace them with Hornby or Bachmann, or even rods from an Airfix construction kit 08 suitably bushed/

Edited August 14, 2020 by The Johnster

[cypherman]

5 hours ago, The Johnster said:

AFAIK they are pretty good as regards scale as well, and are a delight to shunt with.  Not only can they be controlled down to a sub-walking pace crawl, they have a slight 'flywheel effect' overrun which you can develop with practice into perfect buffer-kissing.  The 'presence' is less clearly definable, but is certainly there, in precisely the way that the Lima's isn't. 

 

Agreed the windows could be tinted or 'steamed up'; my major grouse apart from the motor-filled cab is the crude overscale connecting rods.  It might be possible to replace them with Hornby or Bachmann, or even rods from an Airfix construction kit 08 suitably bushed/

After giving it some thought I think I know what it is that gives the Wrenn/HD 08 it's presence. All the newer Hornby and Bachmann ones are very fine models that have lots of fine detail that look fragile and probably in some respect is. It is this fragility that stops them having presence on the track. They lack that look of solidity that the real 08's have. Just an opinion

[The Johnster]

I think it's the sheer weight of the model; it's made of neutron star material!  This has an effect on it's motion, so that even at scale walking pace it looks unstoppable in exactly the way that the Lima doesn't.  It's about momentum, the loco is momentous, and thus has 'presence', in spades.  Lighter plastic bodied locos jitter and shudder, and will brickwall stop at the tiniest particle of grit in their way; a HD 08 will just smash through it. And this is a plastic bodied loco we are talking about; imagine if the body was die cast.  

 

It is for this reason that I load my mineral wagons full of real coal.  I know my locos would haul 3 times as many if I did what everyone else does and glue coal to a piece of wagon interior shaped foam, but the way they rumble and lurch over rail joints and the impression of bulk and brute weight you get from them compared to the empties is very much like real loaded and empty minerals, and I like that!

 

Of course, for me modelling is an attempt to create a viable credible scenario in which my models run, and look, and behave, as realistically as I can manage to persuade them to, but it's more than that as well in my case.  It's also nostalgia, not for a golden age when things were better but for a deprived one in which things were worse.  Why on earth would anyone want to recreate that, never mind for pleasure?  British Railways in the 50s is something I can only just recall, but it and the 50s, a spectacularly miserable period of British history are my childhood, 'home' in a sense, and most of my teenage years in the 60s were spent in an awareness that something was at an end and I was witnessing the last of it; steam railways were clearly a big part of this.  

 

My childhood involved, amongst other things, visiting rellys at various places in the South Wales mining valleys, when it was still 'traditional'.   It was amazing, and wonderful, and one of the reasons I model this period in this area.  A lot of it isn't modelled in the corpereal sense, and has to be filled in cerebrally by memory and imagination; the clanking of the overhead buckets, the constant noise of a train somewhere, the sheep, and the rain, and the all pervading 50s greyness and damp.  The actual modelling is an aid to memory and imagination, something to fix the cranial image around.  When it works, which it does quite a bit, it's wonderful.

 

Nothing wrong with a bit of off hand thread drift...

[cypherman]

23 hours ago, The Johnster said:

I think it's the sheer weight of the model; it's made of neutron star material!  This has an effect on it's motion, so that even at scale walking pace it looks unstoppable in exactly the way that the Lima doesn't.  It's about momentum, the loco is momentous, and thus has 'presence', in spades.  Lighter plastic bodied locos jitter and shudder, and will brickwall stop at the tiniest particle of grit in their way; a HD 08 will just smash through it. And this is a plastic bodied loco we are talking about; imagine if the body was die cast.  

 

It is for this reason that I load my mineral wagons full of real coal.  I know my locos would haul 3 times as many if I did what everyone else does and glue coal to a piece of wagon interior shaped foam, but the way they rumble and lurch over rail joints and the impression of bulk and brute weight you get from them compared to the empties is very much like real loaded and empty minerals, and I like that!

 

Of course, for me modelling is an attempt to create a viable credible scenario in which my models run, and look, and behave, as realistically as I can manage to persuade them to, but it's more than that as well in my case.  It's also nostalgia, not for a golden age when things were better but for a deprived one in which things were worse.  Why on earth would anyone want to recreate that, never mind for pleasure?  British Railways in the 50s is something I can only just recall, but it and the 50s, a spectacularly miserable period of British history are my childhood, 'home' in a sense, and most of my teenage years in the 60s were spent in an awareness that something was at an end and I was witnessing the last of it; steam railways were clearly a big part of this.  

 

My childhood involved, amongst other things, visiting rellys at various places in the South Wales mining valleys, when it was still 'traditional'.   It was amazing, and wonderful, and one of the reasons I model this period in this area.  A lot of it isn't modelled in the corpereal sense, and has to be filled in cerebrally by memory and imagination; the clanking of the overhead buckets, the constant noise of a train somewhere, the sheep, and the rain, and the all pervading 50s greyness and damp.  The actual modelling is an aid to memory and imagination, something to fix the cranial image around.  When it works, which it does quite a bit, it's wonderful.

 

Nothing wrong with a bit of off hand thread drift...

Hi Johnster,

I had a similar upbringing. Although it was not the neglected railways of the the South Wales valleys but the urban decay of the Longsight carriage sheds where 08's trundled about moving stock and Diesel Traction Maintenance Depot in the 60's and early 70's. Plus the mainline out from Manchester Piccadilly. The noise and smell of clean and dirty at the same time are a memory long treasured.

Edited August 15, 2020 by cypherman

[DK123GWR]

I'm going to do something very unusual here, and stick up for the RailRoad 08.

Let's get the caveat out of the way to start with: if you care about prototype fidelity this is not for you. The body is not great and the chassis is from a steam loco. However, while it is far from a scale model it is clearly a 350 hp shunter (admittedly there aren't many similar prototypes to confuse it with).

Beyond the very low-spec appearance I can only complement the models for their performance. I still have an early 2000s model in DIno Safari livery (other liveries are available but if you were buying a present for me, age 7, you couldn't overlook trains and dinosaurs in one hit) which runs on DC and it is a very smooth runner at all speeds. It is only beaten at crawling by my brand new DCC fitted Hornby 56 and is controllable at prototypical speeds (even though it is capable of significantly exceeding them. Electrical continuity is fantastic despite no pickups on the centre axle. In fact, I am not planning on upgrading this to DCC because of how well it runs. I had been planning to buy a small loco for a planned DC layout, but after giving some of my old locos a test run realised that the RailRoad 08 would do a fine job.