BrushVeteran

I have a reasonable image of E1706E taken at Stratford in 1966/7. As I am away from my PC at present I am unable to post it but it can be viewed on Robert Carrol's excellent BRCS site. If requested I will post it on this site when I return home next week. Happy New Year. Grahame

Hi Paul What I meant was the re-introduction of the headcode version of the 31 that Hornby made an excellent model of R2572 D5640. These were the the Brush Type 2's which rubbed shoulders with the refurbished Baby Deltics at Finsbury Park from the mid-sixties. The version of D5511 which is coming out is another Stratford Great Eastern pilot scheme locomotive which Hornby are releasing to satisfy those people who have had problems with the original version R2420 D5512. I and quite a few others would love to see another version of R2572 with or without yellow warning panels, so over to you Simon!

I believe the Baby Deltic featured quite high in the 'polls' for diesel classes yet to be mass produced by a model manufacturer. With there not being many classes left to do coupled with the availability of decent archive drawings then the options become very limited. As we know Heljan are well known for getting as much out of their tooling as they can so I would imagine that we will see at least four livery variations on the refurbished bodyshell. As long as it sells, and remember almost 40% of the purchases will be by collectors, then the prognosis for an early version looks good. I think Heljan should be congratulated for taking the risk of pleasing those that will consider buying this model. I for one was fortunate enough to travel behind and photograph these locomotives, see my gallery, and yes there were complaints from the public about them and that is one of the reasons that they eventually got banned from going down to Moorgate. I can remember in my early commuting days into London it was certainly a case of keeping the windows closed! Although fairly reliable in refurbished form they were high cost locomotives to run due to the contractual arrangements between BR and English Electric which involved works visits to Doncaster or Stratford for power unit repairs. But in producing a model we are also trying to replicate the past and today us modellers have never had it so good as far as variety and choice is concerned. Once we can master the sound chip for these then we must have a smoke unit for complete authenticity, complete with oil carryover and unburnt fuel odour, lovely! What we need to go with them are some more green 31's, how about it Simon?