Hornby ‘Large Prairie’
◆ SCALE ‘OO’ ◆ MODEL Hornby R3723 Collett ‘61XX’ 2‑6‑2T No. 6145, BR black early emblem
Abc Combined Volume, shows that I had ‘copped’ 33 out of the 47 surviving ‘61XX’ 2-6-2Ts.
I had also seen a fair few of the ‘41XX’ series ‘Large Prairies’ but most of those had gone by 1964. Though I was not a big ‘Prairie’ fan at the time, I remember them fondly now, due to a number of encounters back in the early 1960s. I watched No. 4109 on March 21 1964 shoving No. 6932 Burwarton Hall and a train of loaded ballast hoppers up Sapperton Bank past the now long-gone Chalford station. I rode the beautiful Gloucester-ross-hereford line behind No. 4107 shortly before it closed, and No. 6161 was the last Reading-based steam locomotive I saw in action.
It took until the 1970s for a ready-to-run ‘Large Prairie’ to
Mappear, from the Airfix GMR stable. It was a very desirable GWR model at the time, well detailed but somewhat let down by its mechanism. It passed eventually to Dapol and was one of the items sold to Hornby. Hornby breathed on the chassis but its origins were always betrayed by the firing shovel moulded on the tank top of the Airfix original. So it was, until the Margate company announced an all-new ‘Large Prairie’ in its 2019 programme. That model is now with us and I’ve had the pleasure of testing and reviewing No. 6145 in unlined black with early crest and, very appropriately for me, carrying the 81D Reading shedcode.
IMPRESSIONS
It has been a very long time since Hornby’s revamp of the Airfix ‘Prairie’, and even longer
◆ PRICE £139.99 ◆ AVAILABILITY Hornby stockists or www.hornby.com since the Airfix version first appeared, so the ‘Large Prairie’ was ripe for a new model to 21st-century standards. Dapol spotted an opportunity to reclaim the ‘Large Prairie’ when it announced its plans for a new model in early 2018 but Hornby had clearly already been working on its new version and it has beaten its Chirk competitor to the model shop shelves. The finesse and delicacy of the details shows immediately that