Going Spare

I think you will find the image on Amazon's website is a very early publicity shot of a real building before the actual design of Hornby's model was settled and what you will receive is as per the Hornby website.

If the tender drive units were made in Great Britain (they normally have that information on the base plate), you will need to identify the class of loco that is being propelled by the tender and then refer to the Service Sheets on the website of Lendons of Cardiff which are available here by referring to the 'Useful Links' post pinned at the top of this forum section. This (Hornby's) website only displays Service Sheets for models made more recently in China. If you have difficulty identifying the loco, post details such as wheel arrangement, cabside number and livery and forum members will be able to offer advice.

Presumably the loco ran satisfactorily when you received it or you would have been in touch with Hattons, so has it deteriorated gradually or was it for the first time today? Can you be more specific about it running "very poorly"? Is it loco- or tender-drive?

As to when the SS loco's will appear, the website is showing Winter 2023/2024 for the P2 so that should be with you fairly soon, and Autumn 2024 for the Black 5.

I do not recall any other owners reporting this problem on the forum so your loco may not be running properly for a reason other than a weak motor. I would speak with the retailer from whom you purchased the loco regarding a replacement, or with Hornby's customer service people.

Two thoughts: 1. There is a split on one of the wheelset gears transferred from the non-powered bogie having been in the unit for the same length of time and under the same stress on the axle, or 2. there is a similar problem with or a foreign body caught up in the six transfer gears between the motor shaft and the wheelsets. It will be a process of elimination: remove each of the wheelsets in turn and if the problem still persists, disassemble the motor bogie and rotate the transfer gears by hand to see if there is anything impeding free rotation, removing one transfer gear at a time until the culprit is found.

No, it won't, Bee. Send it to marketing@hornby.com. Both the website and catalogue are rife with errors, which are (very slowly) being sorted out.

Welcome to the forum. To date from the 1950s, I think your loco must have been a Graham Farish ex-GWR prairie which was produced in BR black in 1952/3 but it carried the number 8103. Tri-ang's BR black standard prairie 82004 was available from 1956, the Airfix GW prairie 6167 did not come along until 1977 and Lima's black small prairie 5574 followed in 1979. (Acknowledgement to Pat Hammond's Catalogue of British Model Trains.)

Agreed, providing Hornby get the scale and design right. The 00 semaphore signals look more at home on a 0-scale layout and the colour-light signal is very basic.

I have always known it as British Railways Coaching Stock Crimson. However, the actual shade of a paint often differs between model manufacturers and even within a manufacturer's range.

Answering your supplementary question first as that may influence your decision to push forward with the repairs. The coarse flanges on the driving wheels should not give you any problems on plain track but may lead to stalling or derailing while negotiating current specification points because the depth of the flangeways and clearances between the frog and check rails have been reduced. If you do proceed, you appear to have a LNER green B12 loco so Service Sheet 67 is the one I think you will need, plus sheet 51 for the motor (accessible on the Lendons of Cardiff website via the Useful Links post pinned at the top of this forum section) will give you some - but not all -pointers for wiring runs and part numbers. The black brush insulator looks to be broken. Also, if the Synchrosmoke system works and you intend using it, the top of the smoke unit body is missing - this has a funnel directing the smoke to the base of the loco's chimney.

Good to hear you are well set up to deal with this and any future failures. A good job Hornby (perhaps unintentionally!) provided spares with every unit. Use them sparingly because this unit was last made well over twenty years ago and was never upgraded to use a Hornby motor bogie so spares will not be made again and I doubt whether Dapol have kept any or use the same drive system in their more recent models.

The wheelsets fitted in at least the non-powered bogie of the power car were the same as those used in the power bogie - i.e. they carried gears. Check your unit - you may be able to do a no-cost swap-over.

I have found online references to R092 (most likely) and R094 for the set but R182 appears to relate to Percy rather than James. Being introduced in 1988, I think small transformer/controller R912 with a thumbwheel speed/direction control (or perhaps the R964 transformer and R965 controller pairing) would have been included.

There are, very approximately, 600 product items (excluding individual track pieces, Humbrol, scenic materials, etc.) in the 2024 00 catalogue, some of which has yet to arrive but no doubt the warehouse shelves still contain product no longer in the catalogue to partially counteract that. So, if the average cost price of 550 of those items is £50 and the average stockholding is 200 of each item (both guesses), the inventory figure for Hornby 00 alone is £5.5 million. Then there is track, spares, TT120, Airfix, Corgi, Humbrol, Scalextric and possibly some if not all the International brands stock as the £22 million is a Hornby Group figure.

Back in October 2021, 96RAF confirmed my understanding that express points used as a crossover results in the tracks being closer than the standard spacing, so whether this is so, or not, needs clearing up.

But, accepting that Hornby are lax in their use of eras, a BR liveried loco would take the set in to eras 4 or 5.

Which, at 166mm accords exactly with a TT standard straight but, if measured accurately, not with the 00 equivalent at 168mm. That, however, begs the question as to the accuracy of the widths of the contents of the three packs given as 4.5cm upwards because there does not appear to be much overhang beyond the ends of the track sleepers (excluding the figures).

The Princess Coronation was among the X8849 gear set users alongside several other chassis including the Merchant Navy. On the latest Service Sheet (438E) for the Princess Coronation, X8849 has been replaced by X7360 and as that gear set is currently available, it may be worth investigating for Merchant Navies and others.

Hornby advise they will try to assist where they can and suggest you make contact. It is their intention to offer the chain couplings as replacement parts in due course but are unable to say when that might be at the present time.

I think most would accept that replacement parts can not be kept available for models indefinitely but chassis using parts such as the gear set you are seeking were still being released to the market just two years ago. Although I believe Hornby are suffering the consequences of previous management decisions to dispense with the services of experienced parts staff a few years ago - and also more recently lost a senior staff member in far more tragic circumstances - by their own admission, priority has been given to maintaining the flow of red box items over the supply of parts, and the latter has proven to be much more inflexible for them than the likes of Bachmann because Hornby do not own their own factory in China.

The replacement traction tyres pack is indeed X6030 but I have failed to find it offered for sale anywhere and it is not shown as available on Hornby's own parts list despite the tyre also fitting the Eurostar. I would lodge a complaint with Customer Services.

Contact technicalservices.uk@hornby.com.

You initially said you had purchased two H-D A4s but the latest post and photograph relate to an A1 or A3 "Scotsman". If the coupling attachment is for an A4, the A1/A3 bogie may not have been designed to accept it. Having said that, the bogie block does appear to have what looks like a NEM pocket in the raised central section to take the tails of the coupling head. The tails do not need to be compressed for removal, a good pull is all that is normally needed.

@bee - Regret, unable to help as this is another case of no documentation yet issued so it needs someone with one of the loco's, or Hornby Customer Services, to come up with a definitive answer. Perhaps photographs will give us a clue.