The little trains always bring me shame

If you stopped by for a read on Friday, you'll have seen Chris Nevard's excellent photos of my Garratt loco on his layout.

I took the loco for a day out at Railex and handed it over with the H Class first thing in the morning. Chris and his lackey Graham, seemed impressed and the big engine quickly usurped the J94 on the mine side of the layout. To be honest, the poor chap was reduced to running Great Western locomotives, so leapt at the chance of something descent.

Now, I know the Garratt can be a cantankerous beast. Those gearboxes need to be warmed up every so often or they don't run smoothly. The Hellingly Hospital engines all need a good thrash before the 108:1 gears start to behave.

With this in mind, the day before, I ran the engine up and down my test track for a few minutes. I only have three axles-worth of rolling road or it would have stretched its legs on there. All seemed well so the model was wrapped up in bubbles and stuck in a box for transit.

Needless to say, once on the track, the front power unit would run backwards as well as ever. Forwards only happened in a series of jerks. The back unit performed as well as you could hope which somehow made it worse.

Anyway, the engine posed for pretty pictures but didn't get the chance to earn it's keep as I'd hoped. I still don't know why it mis-behaves either. Probably just thrown a huff.