Hornby Magazine’s resident Time Lord Tim Shackleton fast-forwards a GBRf Class 66 and simultaneously backdates a British Rail Class 50 with intriguing results.
Above: Less than a month in service, D431 catches the evening light before departure on the 6.15pm Blackpool South- Euston on August 31 1968. At first, only D400 and D401 had multiple-working pipework on the nose – the rest were fully wired up but didn’t have the relevant external connections. Jacy collection.
Locomotives are in a state of flux throughout their working lives and those that survive into preservation frequently go through further drastic iterations. Changes in external detail may be only the tip of the iceberg compared with what goes on with the locomotive’s inner workings, especially with diesel and electric traction. But even with modern production methods, ready-to-run manufacturers can’t mirror every individual variation or offer multiple numbering options.
In this piece I want to show what I did to create models that more specifically met my own requirements. The first project came from a wish to recreate an English Electric Class 50 in its nearly-new 1967/1968 incarnation using as the basis the nearest available model.
As bought, Hornby’s D421 repres…
