ColinB

Well Bulleidboy it should do but as I said on City of Winchester it did stick a bit. So exactly which class 73 are you trying to open? I have two proper Hornby ones City of Winchester and GB Railfreight number 73964. If it is the Railfreight one, I will find it and see if there is any difference. I remember buying that because someone was doing them really cheap. They should come apart just like the class 66 but sometimes I think the cab front can get stuck on the front glazing. On mine the buffers are moulded into the chassis so they don't come off.

I suddenly remembered I did buy a genuine Hornby one, yes I know I should have remembered but my excuse is I have been building and not done much on my trains for a year. On my Hornby City of Winchester it has four clips each side that clip into the chassis, these are pretty easy to get off. The glazing front and back has a slot that clips onto the cab ends front and back, these were extremely tight on my one, you just have to gently rock the body from side to side and eventually it should release. Looking at mine there is some black tack holding the wires on, I am pretty sure I didn't add this Hornby were into this at one point. It could be that the black tack is stopping it releasing, so you might have to run a thin knife between the body and chassis to release it, be careful though because you could cut through the wires that run close to the body.

I have got several Lima class 73s that I converted to the latest Hornby chassis. Now unless Hornby changed the Lima design significantly the body just clips off using 4 credit cards as levers. It is the Lima class 47 that have the buffers holding it on. I think that there is another loco that Lima did that on as well. There are no holes in the chassis for screws, well at least not on my one, They may have used clips at the front or back as they did on the HST which are difficult to unclip.

I don't know threelink we thought that in the Classic Motorcycle community but EBay becomes expensive and the Sellers become greedy. We don't have many toyfairs around here so I don't know what they are like for prices but you have the point that it is much nicer to see the stuff and see all the faults.

The Jouef ones were a lot cheaper and I have had issues before with the Oxford couplings before, so I bought 3 Jouef ones. They also have the older Triang couplings which may look ugly but are a lot more reliable.

Great, thanks for the information. I forgot Oxford Rail do ones that are quite reasonable so I might go that way.

Yes those are the ones. So how many windows do the right one have? I notice Hornby are releasing some of these soon, so perhaps I should just wait.

They probably also sold out because they were really good value for money. I thought Hornby would cost reduce it but they didn't.

Can anyone tell me what range of part numbers or how you can tell the shortened MK3 BR blue coaches used with HST from the later proper length ones. Obviously if I could see the things it would be obvious but from a photo not so. I could buy Lima ones which are the right length but for some reason all of them on EBay are minus their bogies. Is there any reason for this?

Hornby decoders have always seemed to have an issue with heat dissipation. I couldn't understand why I used to have random failures of TTS decoders then I realised it was because I heat shrinked them as per all the other decoders I buy with it already done. The 21 pin options are not shrink wrapped, as the mounting on a PCB is tons better than 8 pin and virtually impossible for it to touch anything metallic. For the 8 pin there is still a risk, so I fit them in a sleeve of unshrunk heatshrink so that the air can pass over them.

Yes Deem I bought the Knight of the Thistle and Doncaster, both the same as far as I can see. Looks like they ran out of Doncaster. I bought the two as they were so cheap, the thing that got me was that they were 10% off full price everywhere else. Before the offer I had thought about buying one at full price, really glad I didn't.

It depends what you want to do with it. I have an Elite, a Fleishmann Twin Track and a DigiKeijs DR5000. The first two I bought broken and fixed, the third I bought to replace the second. I found to program locos the Elite is great with its easy to use menus, the downside being that you press the rotary controller to get the unit to accept the command which sometimes means it changes the value you originally selected. The other issue I found was controlling two locos at the same time, the Elite looks at first glance that you can do this easily but in reality there is only one display so you have to select between one and the other by pressing one of the two select switches. So I kept the Elite for programming and used the Fleishmann twin track for the layout because it does as it says two independent channels so you can control two locos at the same time easily. Unfortunately Zimo seem to do something to their new range of sound decoders so the Fleishmann didn't always work properly so I moved to the DR5000, which is a windows multitasking system where you can control as many trains as you want it will also do wireless on your phone. Wonderful system but the bad news is the firm went bust, although I am told there is a new firm updating the design and making new units. So as I said it depends what you want, I consider the Elite to be excessively overpriced, many on this site don't. The other noticeable difference between an Elite and an DR5000 is the function buttons for sound. On the Elite to get say Function F22 that is 3 menu change presses, on the DR5000 all the function buttons appear at the side of the speed setting so much easier to access.

I assume these are old locos, when I converted all my old locos I tried many different decoders. Unfortunately I found many didn't deliver the current stated in the specification, a couple of makes just smoked when the loco stalled on a point. I used Zimo decoders as I found these to be the most reliable and higher output current. In all cases I hard wired a socket into the loco either an 8 pin or if there wasn't enough room as in the case of a split chassis Bachmann A4 a 6 pin. Fortunately with Zimo the 8 pin and 6 pin are electronically the same. I have found with some other makes the 6 pin varieties seem to be designed for N gauge motors so didn't work too well. The Train O Matic ones seem pretty good as well. I would definitively recommend fitting a socket of some kind so you can easily change decoders if you have issues or if you want to test the loco on DC.

I must admit I just copied his post.

Generally because the way the DCC sockets are wired in these type of models, you don't need to touch CV19.

Well erratic running is dirty wheels or possibly oil or deposit over the pickups (by pickups I mean the pickup plate underneath). On one loco I found the pickup plate was held on by self tapping screws as is normal with older Hornby locos, but someone had stripped the threads so a decent connection was not being made. As to the high speed could be as I done once and someone has put a different motor in it. A lot of Hornby motors look the same but some run have different gearing so run faster. A new Princess Royal class motor looks exactly the same as the one fitted to A4s, Coronations and West Countrys but it runs at a much higher speed as I found out. At one point you couldn't get the proper motors so people fitted what they could.

If you do need a decoder I just use those cheap LaisDCC ones. I also have a set of Coronation coaches and Virgin coaches made by Hornby with lights that stay on all the time.

I often wonder if they use the local primary school. To be serious though, it isn't the best. There are a lot of people who think they are software experts just because they managed to write a "Hello World" program (joke amongst software developers) even on this site there was a supposed software expert who didn't know the correlation between binary and hex (try repeating a 64 bit binary number down a telephone line)..

From my experience juddering is dependant on the relationship of the decoder with the motor, all the DCC controller does is give it the right command. So I think it really depends on what locos you are using the HM7000 for. I must admit though I never see it on a Zimo decoder, sound or normal, but I have seen it on others.

Just to add, tried the fix on my other P2 and that know runs properly. I will add, the back to back spacing on the front bogie was wrong which initially threw me but once I had fixed that, another success. So I suspect the shoulder on the bolt is about 0.5mm too short.

I know atom3624, I obviously only did it to see if a longer bolt would fix the issue. My other hobby is building classic motorcycles, so I definitely know the importance of having tight bolts, although on a classic bike they aren't for very long. There is a new post with the proper fix.

I am still testing it but I may have found a solution. In mine there seems to be an issue with the stepped bolt holding on the front bogie so what I did was put two thin spaces under the shoulder. These are the type you use for spacing on the valve gear. They have to be thin otherwise you won't have enough threads on the screw to get a decent fixture. The loco has been happily doing circuits of my layout without derailing which it would have done without the fix.

I know SteveM6 I spent a couple of hours checking to see what was wrong. When I was trying to resolve the issue I loosened the bogie screw off to give move travel and it worked perfectly. Normally I would just replace the screw with a longer one to give more travel but as I said the thread is either a very tight M2 or something just a bit smaller. I am sure I will fix it. Incidentally, virtually all my locos are "new type" Hornby or Bachmann, the old stuff I sold on EBay and those I didn't sell, I put a new chassis on the old body. My Railroad P2 I added a weight but virtually everyone does that, most of my Duchess/City locos have the new front bogie where obviously Hornby realised they had an issue with the old one (the new Princess Royal one fits with an adaption to the mounting bracket). Either way it is not that relevant to this thread which was highlighting what a good loco the A1 is.

What you could do is mail TMC models and get them to repaint just that bit. Yes it will cost a bit more than doing it yourself but as you say it is an expensive model (why I do not know, I got mine for RRP off Hornby after the prices went haywire). I got them to fix the transfers on a tender where someone had put oversize ones on and result was perfect.

Actually I was complimenting the A1 and what a good loco it is, I just mentioned that Hornby got it very right on that one. The rest is me saying that on others they don't seem to. The thing that did get me was TMC was selling them at half price so they were not that popular but as I say it ticks all the boxes. Funny I was thinking of buying Doncaster at full price because the A3s super detailed locos are usually very good (I have built many from parts along with A4s) so I was even more impressed that I got it for half price that I bought the "Knight of the Thistle" as well. They both run really well. As a side issue the Railroad front bogie if I remember is totally different to the new P2, I will eventually figure out how to fix it and let you know. Those two wheeled front bogies always seem to be an issue on both Hornby and Bachmann models especially with Peco double slips. I think that they are so light they bounce up and when they bounce back down they embed themselves in the wrong piece of track on the slip.