Heljan’s ‘OO’ gauge GWR ‘1366’ dock tank is an attractive shunting engine which made its debut in 20156. MIKE WILD inspects this outside cylinder pannier tank.
The Great Western Railway (GWR) was known for its standardisation, but sometimes it broke with tradition – although not too much. The Collett ‘1366’ 0-6-0PT is a case in point. It maintained the ‘group standard’ pannier tank appearance, but retained the outside cylinders and motion of its predecessor – the Churchward ‘1361’ 0-6-0ST.
That small change in design to locate the cylinder outside the frames has its benefits for us as modellers as it has created an opportunity for Heljan to model this small but distinctive class of locomotives and offer us something different to the ‘run of the mill’ inside cylinder GWR 0-6-0PTs.
You can read the full story of the ‘1366s’ in Reality Check this issue, but here we will concentrate on the 4mm:1ft scale offering which arrived in the shops just a couple of days before Christmas in 2016. Heljan announced the model at the Warley National Model Railway Exhibition in November 2013 (and soon added that it would producing the earlier ‘1361’ 0-6-0ST too – a model wh…
