To melt one Eurostar is unfortunate, to melt THREE looks like carelessness...

[Ducking Giraffe]

Steve's melting trick has raised its ugly head again. First it was a Hornby Dublo engine shed roof. Then a Lima Class 55 Deltic body. Now last spring it was not one but THREE Eurostar bodies!

The only common denominator is they were all in Really Useful Boxes and exposed to high-ish but not excessive temperatures. I mean, what's the melting point of thermoplastics, 200 degrees or something? No way they got that hot. Nothing else melted or caught fire or was damaged, just the items above. The first two were in the shed by a shaded window in the summer, and the Eurostar bodies were left outside in the sun for a day in spring in a useful box. The only thing I can think of is high concentrations of plasticisers leaching out of the boxes and then only a moderate temperature rise needed to distort things?

Luckily Eurostar bodies are cheap as chips so its dead easy to whip out lights windows and pantographs and stuff them in new bodies. Job done.

(nothing fancy, 9v battery in body, push-button switches on roof, 3mm leds push fit in lights. Easy peasy.)

[RDS]

RDS Mod Note: @Ducking Giraffe. I have approved your new thread and pictures and deleted the 2 extra identical threads. All posts with pictures need Moderator approval before they are displayed, so there is no point/need to keep trying.

Incidentally, sorry to see your models melted like that.

[Going Spare]

Were the batteries in the bodies during these storage periods?

[ColinB]

Hornby bodies do seem to have an extremely low melting point for plastic. A few years ago I was adding lights to an unrebuilt West Country. When I heatshrinked the cables using steam from a kettle I noticed the body had warped. Also if you ever had one of those locos with steam in the 1980s, Stowe comes to mind, look at the body and you will see it is slightly distorted even though Horny tried to avoid it by putting foil around the steam generator.

[atom3624]

Hi DG, sorry to see that. Very much doubt thermo-plastics are employed by Hornby.

Nice job with the lights, and an impressive line-up!

CB, watch out for that sticking 'B' on the keyboard - I had that affliction a few years ago!!

Al.

[Rana Temporia]

DG, I have come across several Lima Deltics that have melted and sagged in the middle. I managed to recover one with a new body as the chassis wasn’t too bad but the others have all ended up as a source of replacement bogies. I wonder if the length and design of the body made them unstable, all my other Lima locos have been fine.

[ColinB]

Do you know on three attempts of reading it I never noticed. The autochecker normally doesn't let you post without the b.

[threelink]

I have not had this problem myself but I have straightened warped bodies using steam from a kettle spout or just very hot water, indicating that some plastic bodies will start to soften at about 100 degrees centigrade, a temperature easily reached inside a box stored in sunlight or other hot conditions.

[Will Hay]

I had this problem with a Hornby Virgin Dummy DVT but that was sat on the track, not moving and burned/melted directly above the blanking plate on the decoder socket.

The result and smell was quite impressive, which Hornby replaced.