England In Scotland

Model Rail Scotland returned at the weekend after a two year pandemic-enforced break, and it brought home to me how 4mm narrow gauge modelling has burst into the mainstream while we've been away.

On trade stands of the 'box shifters' around the giant exhibtion hall in the SEC I kept coming across Bachmann Double Fairlies among all the 00 and N gauge products, and of course the latest version of 'Merddin Emrys' was prominent on the company's own display along with the unpainted samples of the Quarry Hunslets.

The Peco stand, naturally, featured the Small England which we are expecting in the shops imminently.

While a senior figure from Peco was admiring Bron Hebog during the show I remarked to him that they were more than welcome to liberate one of those samples from their display case and bring it over to the layout to show it in an authentic setting.

This was something Accurascale were doing with their brand new Class 55 Deltic models, depositing them on a number of the 00 layouts around the show, which seemed like a pretty smart marketing move to me.

Towards the end of the Sunday (when there were barely any visitors left in the hall.....) the man from Peco returned holding a model of Prince, and so for the first time we - and they - got to see how it performs 'in the wild'.

And the verdict is that I was impressed.

And I'll admit I was wrong to scoff at those traction tyres.

The Bachman Fairlie struggled in the back-to-back test against our Backwoods brass models - as you would expect - but the hard truth is that even with our lightest, styrene-built, carriages it can't pull a prototypical load for a Fairlie up the bank on Bron Hebog.

We hooked the Peco England onto our Victorian set, which includes three brass bogie carriages - a load which would test the Bachmann Fairlie to the limit - and it strolled up the grade with no hint of slip.

Not only that, but it ran very smoothly.  

There was no hint of a stutter on any points or board joints, and it was very controllable.

This was very pleasing because my previous experience of using Kato power, in our KMX Tamper and the Parry People Mover, is that they are very flighty and hard to control, and geared much too high.

It's also been our experience so far running the Bachmann locomotives, that although they run beautifully smoothly they are very sensitive to gradient.

They slow as soon as they start up a hill and are liable to run away on descent unless you are quick to throttle back.

One of the - justifiable - criticisms of the Peco product is that it is not DCC ready out of the box, you will need to get your soldering iron out and re-engineer the model yourself.   

In terms of how it looks, the finish is very shiny, and I would want to calm it down with a satin varnish, for sure.

And there are still those other things that disappoint, like the slide bars which are nothing at all like the prototype, and having a one-size-fits-all nameplate moulding on the tanks which stands out a mile on the Prince version.

So a big thumbs up for the chassis, but I wish they'd just tried a little harder on the body and not settled for the compromises that have been made.

And I still don't know what they were thinking of showing off those dreadful engineering prototypes a few years ago - some things are best left behind closed doors.