Ozexpatriate

Very nice - thank you for sharing.

Regarding weathering, there are lots of people who have moved on from decals for heralds and are printing ink onto LEGO bricks.

I don't know if this is printed or decal-ed but this is the sort of thing I see these days.

Most of course do so for heralds, but you could 'print' weathering. (Should you want to.)

Nice analysis. Time does fly. Here we are with new Halls (Hornby) and the modified Halls (Bachmann).

While some people have shared photographs, I've not seen any done as carefully as this comparison.

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%