Hornby R3617 Merchant Navy 'Elder Dempster Lines'.

[ColinB]

I bought this off Amazon for a quite reasonable price. I was amazed when it arrived, to find that it is virtually the same as my 20+ years old one. The only obvious difference is the 4 pin connector between loco and tender. Now I am not complaining, it was a good model and still is, but I am amazed that Hornby have not upgraded it in all that time. The only noticeable difference is that this one doesn't have the speedo drive although there is a slot in the body for it. It even still has the movable rear pony track, which Hornby dispensed with on the rebuilt Battle of Britain/West Country ages ago.

[Bulleidboy]

Hi Colin - The Merchant Navy Class loco's were introduced in 2000 (so over twenty years ago - just!), and other than the change to DCC, which required changes to the body internals, there have been no significant changes, and I doubt that there ever will be. With the introduction of the M/N's in original format, I would very surprised if there were now any improvements or even new models in rebuilt form.

You have to look back to the genuine loco to see when speedometers were fitted, not all loco's had them when built. BB

[ColinB]

I had already converted one of my old ones to DCC and sound by adding in the 4 pin connector and adding a socket in the tender, which is quite easy to do. The biggest issue was cutting the hole and mounting the 4 pin socket on its PCB. It was just I would have thought they would have updated the chassis in line with all their other locos. As I say I am happy with the loco, just surprised even more so that that the RRP for this model is about the same price as the newly released Unbuilt Merchant Navy.

[ColinB]

Oh I forgot, I would have expected them to have added the movable coal option, even my United States Lines has that.

[Chrissaf]

Colin,

If you click the three vertical dots in the top right corner of your posts. You will find that you have additional tools available to you to use. You could have used the 'Edit' option to add the text of your second post to the content of the first one [you still can if you want to experiment]

Additionally, there is also a 'Delete' tool, you could have self deleted the thread you previously left the 'please delete this' message in. You should [theoretically] be able to use the 'delete' tool to remove the post directly above after transferring the text to the other post using 'Edit'.

[ColinB]

Thanks Chrissaf, I never thought to look there. I will do that next time.