HORNBY GWR COLLETT
Hornby has released one of its most eagerly awaited new products - the Great Western Railway Collett bow-end coaches - with barely a word. Five new toolings are involved for three types of coach, because the two composite vehicles are available in both right and left-handed versions. But first we need to understand why there were ‘left-handed’ and ‘righthanded’ versions. The initial vehicles were assembled in ten-coach sets, formed around a restaurant car. In order to have all the corridors on the same side of the train, and so that first class customers wouldn’t have to walk though third class accommodation to reach the dining car, composites and brake composites needed to have the corridors on the correct side. It is difficult to imagine the GWR retaining these fixed sets for long, even if the formations did not require strengthening, and there’s plenty of evidence to show how mixed up with much older stock GWR trains were. These new models provide ready-to-
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run pre-war GWR coaches to the same standard Hornby has set with its Gresley, Stanier and Maunsell vehicles. Modellers who prefer uniformity to authenticity can make up trains of matching coaches, while those of us who model the BR period, represented by the crimson and cream versions reviewed here, need have no qualms about mixing them with Hawksworth stock, or BR Mk 1s. A couple of Colletts hauled by a ‘57XX’ 0-6-0PT would also make an appropriate branch line train for many of the Western Region’s secondary routes in their final years. Construction of the models follows Hornby’s established practice, in which a moulded plastic bodyshell is attached to the floor and underframe by concealed clips. My initial impression was that the models seemed a bit flimsy. When grasped in the middle, they flex and creak slightly, suggesting separate toolings for the walls and the roof. But the bodyshell is a one-piece moulding comprising sides, ends and a roof, to which lots of separate, vehicle-specific details are attached. These include roof, end and side handrails in wire, gangways and gangway suspension arms and guard’s door grab handles. The commode handles on the passenger doors are also separate fittings, in brass colour. The clear glazing has the correct degree of ‘flushness’, with minimal prism effect, and the security grilles in the guard’s van are printed on the inside of the glazing. Toilet windows are frosted. Some, but apparently not all, of these coaches had a horizontal bar across the toilet window (presumably the upper part being an opening toplight) but this is not reproduced on the Hornby models. The ends of the coaches are particularly convincing, with GWR suspended gangways, steps, panelled end doors and some splendid sprung buffers with blackened metal heads and Gwr-style rectangular shanks. The pièces de résistance are the long side lamp irons. The roofs have separate
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