Rails LNER dynamometer car
◆ SCALE ‘OO’ gauge ◆ MODEL Rails of Sheffield LNER dynamometer car 23591, LNER pre-war teak livery ◆ PRICE £125.00 ◆ AVAILABILITY Rails of Sheffield Tel: 01142 551436 Web: www.railsofsheffield.com
Talk about always being the bridesmaid and never the bride… All eyes have focused on Gresley ‘A4’ No. 4468 Mallard this summer for, 80 years ago in July, the blue ‘Pacific’ thundered down Stoke Bank snatching the world speed record for steam from Deutsche Reichsbahn 4-6-4 No. 05002. Today, Mallard is positioned so that it’s one of the first things you see when you enter the National Railway Museum’s Great Hall. Tucked behind, however, is LNER Dynamometer Car No. 902502, just as it was on June 3 1938. Engineers and technicians on board this vehicle actually captured and recorded the work that driver Joe Duddington and fireman Tommy Bray were doing on the footplate that historic day. The real No. 902502 is likely to remain, quite literally, in Mallard’s shadows but, thanks to a three-way partnership between Rails of Sheffield, Rapido Trains and the National Railway Museum, it should now be able to bask in a bit of glory itself as it’s the subject of this stunning new model. It’s been just over a year that the new ‘Rails Limited’ brand was launched amidst No. 902502’s mass of Heath Robinson-like recording equipment. The first view of the new ‘OO’ gauge LNER dynamometer car was a stereolithography print. It showed much promise – but you had little clue just how good the resulting model would be. Received for review is what Rails of Sheffield has called ‘Version 1’. This depicts the dynamometer car as it was in 1938, with the running number 23591. ‘Version 2’ features its post-may 1946 running number, the one it still carries to this day. Rapido Trains’ reputation for incredibly fine detail preceded its entry into the British model railway market. The Stirling ‘Single’ reviewed in MR251 was a great looking model, but the dynamometer car is in another league and really shows just what Rapido is capable of. This is simply a jaw-dropping model and it’s difficult to know just where to start. Our eye was caught by the recording wheel and associated underframe fittings. Follow the pipes inside and everything is perfectly aligned. The shape looks good and compares well to photographs. There’s so much very fine
separately fitted detail for your eyes to take in but, though the model requires careful handling, none of it feels as though it’ll fall off if you accidentally breathe on it too hard! If push came to shove, we’d have to say that the patterns on the clerestory windows are our favourite detail. The windows are NEM pockets so small you could have forgiven Rapido for leaving them off but, no, the intricate patterns have been captured beautifully. Replicating LNER teak ‘livery’ in ‘OO’ is always a challenge. Hornby’s LNER coaches required 280 tampo print processes to create a particularly lifelike finish. Rapido has gone for something simpler. It’s a dotprinting process that, from normal viewing distances, portrays a realistic woodgrain finish. Get closer to the model though and the individual dots reveal themselves, a bit like when you look at a newspaper photograph close up. Included is the usual plastic bag of bits containing vacuum pipes and etched end screens which, Rapido suggests, should be applied with a small amount of glue behind the end pipes. What you won’t find included in any other British outline ‘OO’ gauge coach is the controllable interior lighting system. This is the dynamometer car’s party trick and it’s so simple that you wonder why it hasn’t been used before on a British outline coach. The key is Rapido’s ‘magic wand’, which is a plastic stick with a magnet on the end of it. Wave the wand over the roof and the magnet activates a switch inside which, if your track is live, should switch the lights on, allowing you to take in all the interior detail. Wave it again and the lights turn off. It’s a super system, even if it does make you feel as though you’re at Hogwarts while you’re doing it! For some added interest, you could fit magnets to your tunnel portals to make the lights work automatically as it enters and leaves the tunnel. Now, all this beautiful detail and fancy switching does come at a pretty price. We know that the cost of ‘OO’ gauge coaches is