andyman7

The instruction leaflet actually recommends a layer of sellotape (and says that this still allows for heat dissipation), but I didn't want the tape glue round the chip. I therefore chose a loose single layer wrap of masking tape because it is much lighter tack - I will monitor the situation though. For anyone that needs it, I've attached a diagram to show how the lighting plug is connected to the cab roof and headlight PCBs:

And made in very limited numbers so a very niche production, but it nice for them to acknowledge that part of their heritage.

That's not quite true. Diecast moulds can be run with plastic, the latter runs at higher pressure so can be used to test them, so plastic test mouldings of diecast model castings exist. On that basis I'd be surprised if the process can't be reversed. Back in the 70s when cutting costs was all the rage, Dinky toys in particular often had metal castings substituted for plastic, run on the same tools.

There is good and bad everywhere, and one's own experiences are obviously going to influence things. But Kings Cross has really been transformed in the last few years!

Please no Daily Mail style claptrap that London is somehow a no-go area! I have lived and worked in London all may life. The area around Kings Cross is completely regenerated these days and is pretty much unrecognisable from the fleapit it was in the 70s, (when you had to be very careful round there!). That's why these days no model shops can afford the rents anymore. It's a city of 8.7m people, so more stuff (good and bad) happens across the metropolis than anywhere else simply due to numbers.

The DInky trademark is owned and still used by Mattel so is not available for Hornby's use. I suspect that the reuse (for the first time in many years) of the Tri-ang name is due to trademark rights having lapsed elsewhere due to non-use.

The C4 package allows for a 1 hour edited race within their 2 hour highlights show. For 2019, I found out that Sky1 was showing a similar 1 hour edited race but with absolutely no pre- and post-race preamble and this came in handy if I just wanted to see what happened - I don't neccessarily need all the comment. I've a standard Virgin TV package that gives me Sky1 but not the F1 channel unless I subscribe for the whole sports package which in my case is a complete waste of money. For the early evening races or one that looks like it might be tasty I normally just fork out the £8.99 to watch live on NOW TV. I'm hoping to apply this approach in 2020 too. Although on one level I certainly miss having all the F1 races live free-to-air, it's certainly made me more sociable on summer Sundays where previously I'd be persuaded/dragged out of the house only to spend the time grizzling and wanting to be on the sofa....

Well having taken a look at this with a cool head today, I've dealt with most of the issues and am sharing them here in case anyone else needs to know. Fitting the TTS chips - the only issue in the dummy car was that despite the chassis having mounting screws for the speaker, the weight gets in the way. A dig in the spares box for a couple of longer self tapping screws lets the speaker housing rest on top of the weight, still plenty of room to get the body on. The power car was fine although the supplied screws are not self tapping so won't bite into the chassis holes. Spares box again, sorted. Both chips wrapped in masking tape and enough room to get the body back on. As for the lights - well a precaution I have taken is to tag the wires from the plug L - M - R so that if they become detached I know which position on the LED lighting board they go. This was fine for the power car because only one wire was detached, on the trailer all three have come off. The easiest solution was just to order a replacement X7077 harness, it won't go in the model as I'll keep it for spares but it will let m note the plug-to-PCB wiring order, I'll tag and resolder the wires in the trailer once it arrives. Meanwhile the boy is happily playing with the set, just minus one set of lights until that last job is done.

It's genetically Rovex, but the current range owes much less to that heritage than it did 25 years ago, and features tooling developed in China, acquired from Dapol (ex-Airfix) and Lima as well as Margate tooling sent to China. On a factual point, the Triang name was dropped because after the Triang (Lines Brothers) group went into administration in 1971, the administrators sold the Triang tradename to another buyer with part of the nursery toy range and so Dunbee-Combex-Marx did not have the right to it when they acquired Rovex although they did get the Hornby trademark. Wrenn had been acquired by the Lines Brothers group in 1967 but used the administration to buy themselves out again, they essentially carried on the Hornby-Dublo range until 1992 when the original firm closed down. The name and tooling passed through Dapol (who still own and use a number of the original H-D plastic wagon body tools) - the Wrenn company that was wound up in 2015 was a successor company set up to manage the spares, history and some limited wagon releases rather than a full scale manufacturing outlet. At this distance I think the current Hornby company have earned the right to the spirit of the original company as well as the name. The market they serve these days is very similar to the classic 1930s Hornby firm which at one end made models that competed with the scale offerings but was always more family oriented than the 'serious' suppliers and always endeavoured to market a complete system.

My son (11) used his Christmas money to buy the TSS (MTU) decoders for his HST set (Hornby GWR latest pattern superdetail versions). He is young enough to still assume that plug & play means just that, despite my attempts to advise that whilst it makes things easier, finding your way round modern superdetail models and dealing with the issues that arise is often a bit more challenging. 'No problem dad, I've got the bodies off' was followed by my observation that he had broken a number of the headlight lighting wires...... This thread: Covered the older style circuit but since 2016 a plug in wiring harness is used. There is only one wire detached from the power car but proving impossible for me to get enough access to solder it back, so Question1 is 'does the little PCB headlight board pull out or is it glued or otherwise attached?' On the dummy car, all 3 wires are detached at the PCB. I found the complete harness as a spare: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/X7077-Hornby-Spare-Dummy-Light-Board-PCB-for-Class-43-HST/142962231264 But I can in this case, I get access to resolder the wires if I can decipher which pin goes to which terminal. I'm trying to work it out from the photo in the listing but any help would be appreciated. On to the decoders themselves, the mounting screw holes in the dummy car cannot be reached by the supplied screws with the speaker housing as the weight is in the way. So much for plug and play, unless I am missing something. Rather than remove the weight I plan to use longer screws and a dab of blu-tack to seat the speaker on the weight. Any tipe or advice anyone might have with fitting these would help! Many thanks and Happy New Year to fellow RMWebbers

I've got the same problem now with the newer version of the power cars with the plug-in wiring harness. In this case my son was attempting to fit a TTS sound decoder and all 3 wires have detached from the pcb in the cab. There are three loose black wires from the plug to re-attach but it is not obvious which is which. In this case I don't even have a clue which is the ground wire. I may just send the lot of to Hornby to sort out but if I could be certain, or at least have a working process to troubleshoot it, I could do it myself. The bit has learned the hard way that DCC plug and play is not yet truly plug and play in the UK at least.....

It's amazing when you consider that from my perspective 1969 offered so much to see......

As has been documented in these pages, this is a complex subject. I have 1930s Dinky and Hornby O gauge early mazak castings that have distorted but are now stable - we are talking 80-90 years old. Others though crumbled to dust. The problem with the recent (past 20 year) occurances is that they are inevitably in models with much finer tolerances so any distortion proves unworkable - a Hornby O gauge coarse sclae model with mildly fatigued wheels can still be used.

The key date with Triang wheels standards is 1962. From 1962, both locos and rolling stock were fitted with finer profile wheels which in general work find with code 100 track to normal (i.e. not finescale) tolerances. The wheel standards were made finer again for rolling stock in 1970, but anything post 1962 is generally OK. This means that very early Dock Shunters will have deeper flanges but red and later black ones are OK if they haven't had the wheels swapped. The four wheel motor bogies from the 1960s (also used in the Dock Shunter) had serrated rims, supposedly to improve grip but they are dirt magnets and therefore unpopular. From 1970 smooth wheels were fitted, these were available as spares up until the mid-80s but unsurprisingly stocks were exhausted as people sought to replace earlier wheels designs. The locos the OP describes should both be OK.

I didn't but keeping them in place didn't help the heart rate. I did find an extra one floating round inside which has gone in the spares box.....

And finally, at the Cross.....

Well that was a pig of a job! I had already partly stripped the motorised vehicle, so finally got the seat unit out - various bits that need to come out are actually glued in place so this is not easy. All wires were in place, so then I had to strip the trailer and finally found a loose wire to the coupler as suggested. I resoldered it but oh my goodness getting the thing back together was a palaver, it took 3 goes to get the carden shafts in place and the seat unit back, one of the chassis clips broke off and seats kept falling out. Reminds me of why I am not a fan of these superdetail models and all their bells and whistles, multi pin connectors etc. However it is all back together and working, time for a lie down in a darkened room......

Smithfield sidings are still there, on the site of the LSWR sidings (the trackbed of the east curve is long lost). They don't have any scheduled passenger moves but can still be used for 8 car 700s (not long enough for 12 car units). There has been lots of building work around Smithfield that has obliterated much of the lost Victorian infrastructure but a few years back the start of the east curve could be spotted until new building rendered it invisible. Some of the tunnel survives as the basement of an adjacent building but the rest of the formation was lost when the Poultry market was rebuilt in 1958 after being destroyed by fire. The tunnel was temporarily exposed by the reconstruction but then filled in for the foundations of the 'new' Poultry market.

Gievn that within about ten minutes of a new model arriving someone will identify a boo-boo, if that's the worst thing on this model I can live with it......

Ah, OK, I haven't had the chance to compare the mouldings so I was working off the fact that the box/artwork was clearly from the old Hornby tools. But it makes sense to use a single set of tools and the Lima mouldings are a step ahead.

The GWR train set has power cars based on the original 1970s Hornby tooling albeit with a new chassis and with the oversized bolt holes removed and light lens much more neatly fitted. The powered card only is lighted by LED, white light only which lights up in both directions of travel. I assume this is because otherwise the dummy car would need to be decoder socket fitted. Having said that, it is clearly a budget offering of a 'modern' train for those that don't want and old tyme steam train set and much to be welcomed. The Railroad power cars are ex-Lima and so a step up. So it appears that for HST models Hornby now offer 3 classes of travel.....

I've seen the actual models which are considerably better than the catalogue pictures. The InterCity 125 logo is in outline and they are W43002 and W43003 so numbered correctly. If one is going to be picky, they have the logo with black centres which only represents the HST power cars in very early service (1976) as the infill quickly changed to blue; but the power cars have exhaust baffles and guard's window filled in which places them into the early 80s.

A few details will help - is it the super detail version? There are two power cars, one is a dummy without motor but with working lights; the other is powered. Under what circumatnces did you buy it? Shop? Ebay? Elsewhere? Was it boxed?

Yes, but at a price. Until Bachmann really started the revolution in mechanisms in the 1990s, the received wisdom was that the UK market would not pay continental prices.

The main problems with old Triang mechanisms were lack of weight and lack of sufficient pickups to ensure reliable running. Whilst the odd dud mechanism that hadn't been machined right made it through, in most cases the Triang Motor Bogies or X.04 motors once run in and properly lubricated were very good indeed for the time. Unfortunately for the avergae youthful user without access to the skills or help to appreciate these issues, if the loco didn't work properly then that was the end of it.