87 101

Very enjoyable weekend away with Wemblesden. Met some new people and and caught up with some I have known for a while. The layout performed well and received quite a lot of positive feedback from the public. We did have a few issues with one of the main lines and an electrical short developed on one of the points in the depot on sun afternoon. Our next outing will be Stevenage in Jan so plenty of time for more improvements before then. Big thank you to organisers for the invite and I wish them well for next years show.

Thanks Mark. The loco needed tweeking slightly to enable it to run on my layouts as all my other AC's have fixed pans. The pan head on the 85 was angled anyway so the pan mods corrected this. The springs have been removed and put in a safe place. The corridoor lights were too bright so I gave them a thin coat of black acrylic paint to tone them down a bit. As I prefer my locos running pan first I swapped the cab interiors over so that the driver was at the right end. He also had a touch of paint to his head as he looked like a ninja in a hoodie! The loco now looks much better when running on the layout. Well done Bachmann for producing a first class AC loco. Hopfully by the time I get round to building Kidsgrove in N gauge the 85 will be in the farish range.

A few pics of the new arrival

Being modified

26 looks stunning from that pic. Had an email from Hattons saying my order has been processed so hopefully mine should arrive soon.

31-678 Class 85 026 blue - delivered 5 minutes ago

Is it as good as all the mags are saying ?

Thanks guys for uploading all the pics I've just spent an enjoyable half an hour going through them. Good to hear that the models are on their way. I now have my fingers crossed that they will be here soon as I would love to run my pre ordered one on my layout at next months show at Shildon. Going right back to the beginning of the thread there was mention of using an 85 to build an 83. The 83's were the shortest of the early locos so its proberly easer to cut and shut a Hornby 86 shell. I realy must finish mine........

For me its about reliving my youth. Born in 68 about 3 weeks before the end of steam by the time I got intrested in railways in the mid 70's almost everything was blue. My spotting days started about 82 when a few of us used to cycle down to an overbridge on the ECML every night after school. If I had to narrow my modelling down to a couple of years it would proberly be 83-84 although I actualy model 80-88 WCML. Looking back the blue livery might have been dull but the memories definatly wern't.