City of Truro

With carefully washed hands I opened the big box from the National Railway Museum (actually from a distribution centre about 8 miles from where I live) to expose lots of big plastic air bubbles. Under these was some foam and in the foam a locomotive box encased in bubble wrap.

On the bench, the model looks superb. In real life the orange lining is a lot less glaring than it appears in the magazine photos I've seen. Everything else looks lovely. If this was in BR Mixed Traffic livery, even I'd want one.

Steve was happy for me to put the model on a rolling road - it's a lot easier to get anything fixed from the UK than it is on the other side of the planet - so I propped up the tender and bogie as best I could and set the engine in motion. The results can be seen in this video.



Control was via a 1960's H&M Clipper. Even out of the box it is excellent. Some gentle running in and a better controller and this will be horribly silky smooth. I've got all the bits for motorising the Airfix kit and I doubt I could could produce a result as good as this.

Mind you, I do have one idea, which you can see tomorrow...