Beauty and a Beast

Here, at last, is the third of the three locomotives that we had weathered recently by Alex at Mikron Models in Taunton.

I think he has done an excellent job too and, unlike some of our locos, we decided not to have 'St Paddy' too heavily weathered as we felt that it would not be right to have the top loco in our fleet looking too grubby.  

Actually she is, quite literally, Numero Uno since her running number is, of course, 55001.

Interestingly, she is one of the few locos that has retained their factory-fitted sound, in this case Bachmann, as supplied by South West Digital. 

In fact, at first, we thought that the sound was rather poor and seriously considered changing it. Although we could not (and still cannot) use Howes since Brian refuses to produce a Deltic sound file until such time as he can properly replicate the full range of sounds produced by these mighty beasts.

So, what we did was to return it to South West Digital who moved the speaker from inside the body of the loco into the fuel tank and, I must admit, this did vastly improve the sound quality.

Unfortunately, they left the front of the speak exposed to the elements or, in our case, the dust and grit and debris to be found around the layout. However, Alex kindly resolved this by placing a piece mesh over the speaker so that it is fully protected.

Now our Deltic looks and sounds quite beautiful and almost as good as the powerful Type 5 prototype she represents.