Hornby sliding door Mk 3
◆ GAUGE ‘OO’ ◆ MODEL Hornby R4896 Mk 3 Trailer Guard Standard 49103, GWR green ◆ PRICE £34.99
◆ AVAILABILITY Hornby stockists or www.hornby.com here were many reasons why a trip on an HST was a pleasure, but one of them was watching people try to work out how to open the doors. Lowering a drop light, sticking your arm out and grabbing the door handle was a throwback to another era. But as nostalgic as it was, the slam-door Mk 3 no longer complied with current accessibility regulations. Another nail in the Mk 3’s coffin was the replacement of HSTS in frontline service on the East Coast and Great Western Main Lines with Hitachi’s IEP.
But you can’t keep a good train down. HSTS have been transferred to Scotrail and Great Western Railway has retained a small number of four-coach sets for local west of England services
Tand there are still HST sets in service with Crosscounty, while Mk 3s are still in use with Chiltern. In order for these Mk 3s to remain in service, they’ve been fitted with automatic sliding doors and this has allowed Hornby to do something that it arguably should have done some time ago.
It’s long baffled modern image modellers that when Hornby re-tooled its HST power cars back in 2008, it didn’t produce new Mk 3 coaches as well.
If you wanted Hornby Mk 3s to run with your shiny new power cars, you had to rely on what former editor Ben Jones called “a mixed bag of homegrown and absorbed Lima products, with some confusion about whether they’re HST or locomotive-hauled Mk 3a vehicles and a loose interpretation of accuracy in either case” (MR247).
Oxford Rail did come to the rescue with its Mk 3s in 2018. These cover both locomotive-hauled and HST vehicles but, given that they’re slam-door coaches, are clearly not suitable for representing future HST/MK 3 operations.
That’s where Hornby’s new model steps in. Received for review is Trailer Guard Standard 49103 in Great Western’s handsome green colour scheme. First glance shows that this model is light years ahead of its old Mk 3s.
This vehicle, formerly TGS 44097, retains its slam door for the guard’s compartment but has a new sliding door at the other end. The sliding door looks the part but what’s particularly effective is that the door button panel is printed but printed inside a small indented panel.
PROTOTYPICAL
The Mk 3 has a simple shape, with long flat sides and gently curving ends. The underframe equipment is housed inside a long panel and
some glazing of this size suffers from. However, it does affect the window in the sliding door.
INSIDE STORY
Inside is a basic, self-coloured plastic interior, which works rather well given the tinted glazing. Access is easy: you can simply prise the body away from the chassis, and that opens the possibility – quite literally – to detail the inside of your Mk 3 with lighting or passengers. There are some impressive areas, particularly the accurately profiled buffing plate and the way the flexible diaphragm sits in a well on the end of the body (as per the prototype). and looks very effective. There are a couple of less-than-impressive areas, though. The self-coloured plastic three-phase sockets under each end look a little crude and still they have a little bit of flash on them. The lamp irons are little more than moulded lumps and the moulded handrails at the guard’s end are a little under-nourished.
GWR’S green is notoriously difficult to get right for it seems to change depending on the light; it looks dark green in the shade, more blue in full sun. On balance, Hornby’s colouring looks acceptable but the high-gloss finish is excellent and more than makes up for any quibbles over the exact shade. The lighter, diagonal band on the saloon end is a fraction too wide and only the ends of the jacking points should be yellow (Hornby has painted the whole thing yellow).
Despite these minor quibbles, Hornby has done the venerable Mk 3 justice and, with a wide range of coach types and different liveries, these models should be in service on layouts for as long as the real things remain moving passengers around the network. (RF)
It’s only the shape of the ends that, arguably, don’t quite match the standards set by Oxford’s model