OFFTHE RAILS

I suppose this might be considered nit-picking as the new Hornby Castle is a very fine model generally however - I've been looking more closely at my 5068 "Beverston Castle" and reckon that the safety valve cover is leaning forward rather than standing vertically as it should do. The excellent pictures posted by Hilux5972 on 1st August tend to show this too. Does this apply to all of the new Hornby Castles?

I bought a slightly damaged Triang L1 body and tender about 30 years ago (!) with the plan to put a decent chassis under it but apart from fitting wire handrails and RHS steam pipe and carving away the boiler skirt that was it until now. The Triang tender (which the L1 was forced to share with the Triang Midland 3F 0-6-0 and wasn't even accurate for the latter) was ditched long ago. The project was brought back to life when I spotted a Hornby T9 loco chassis on eBay at a very reasonable Buy It Now price. The L1 and the T9 have the same scale 10' driving wheelbase. A wanted ad on RMWEB got me a Bachmann N tender which is the same type as on the prototype L1s. So I now had all the bits, body, chassis and tender and all I had to do was put them all together. I found that : 1. There's plenty of room for the T9 motor and it needn't protrude into the cab 2. An extension plate (similar to the one on the Triang L1 chassis) is needed to support the front end of the body. As a temporary measure I made this out of 60 thou plasticard bolted to the T9 chassis to get the front of the body to sit OK I propose to make this out of something a bit sturdier later. 3. My L1 body had some damage to the floor of the cab and dragbox area so I had to rebuild that area with 60 thou plasticard with a slot to locate with the protrusion at the rear of the T9 chassis 4. It was necessary to remove the small pcb on the rear of the T9 chassis and the wiring to the tender to allow the L1 body to sit correctly. I intend to try to run the loco using the existing pickups on the bogie wheels and rear drivers and put a DCC decoder in the loco smokebox. If this doesn't work well then I'll have to put pickups in the tender. 5. The T9 bogie out of line by about 3mm with the L1 bogie wheel frame cut-outs. The bogie pivot slot in the T9 chassis was therefore opened out so the bogie sits further forward. Here's a photo of the loco in grey primer with the N tender. As it's taken 30 years to get this far I don't expect to finish it in a few days but once a bit more progress has been made I'll post it. EDITED 31/10/2013

Legend wrote : Just wonder if Bachmann going to play a blinder here and announce City of Truro through NRM with perhaps a Dukedog making it into their main range in March? Whilst Bachmann could produce further GWR 6'8 1/2" 4-4-0s with a different body featuring the the smaller No2 boiler (e.g. the "Flowers"), the Dukedogs and Bulldogs would need a different chassis too - with 5'8" wheels. So I don't think we'll see those locos very soon. Ian