peteskitchen

The new chassis looks exactly the same as the old one and is interchangeable, but with square cutouts instead of curved ones for the axles. I can't imagine that that would be any cheaper to produce than the original, plus there must have been some costs involved modifying the existing tooling to make them. Another strange anomaly is they have changed the vac pipes to more accurate ones and are painted red where they are in line with the buffer beams making them look on par with super detail range.

For some reason Hornby has made a new chassis and keeper plate for this model to a much lower quality than when it was non railroad. The axle slots are now square and the rear non driven axle is rigidly mounted with no play. Mine could only just pull itself along. The old keeper plate had its pickups pointing upwards, but this one they point downwards and the rear ones foul the track. Snipping the ends off, slotting out the rear wheel slots and fitting a gentle rear spring transforms the model. Mine will now pull 10 coaches on the flat with ease. However I really don't like the square axle slots as these will soon wear and get sloppy, a problem I've had with an early produced 72xx. I suspect somebody said to Hornby you cant put a round pin in a square slot....

I would have thought it was just a case of different numbers of teeth on a gearset. 20:1 and 40:1 for example can easily be done with the same number of gears, and wouldn't cost any difference at all.

Wasn't that Jouef centre can motor fitted in Playcraft Bo Bo diesels coreless? IIRC it had the most wonderful minute ball bearing races at each end.

Mine has a bent handrail where it goes over the firebox on the right hand side. Otherwise its all ok

Not to mention the dodgy weak motors in the first batch either.

The chap who was behind the project was Ken Joy. I think he even found an original ex class 21 engine. The project folded due to lack of interest and money which is a shame.

Heljan ones do seem to be holding up their price on ebay. We'll have to see if that alters when the blue and maroon ones hit the shelves.