Rivarossi Royal Scot

Rivarossi 1350 - 'Royal Scot' Class 4-6-0 6140 'Hector'

Rivarossi 2931 - Corridor 3rd Class Coach 14289

Rivarossi 2932 - Corridor 1st Class Coach 15604

Rivarossi 2933 - Corridor 1st Class Coach 15933

Rivarossi 2934 - Brake Corridor 3rd Class Coach 16100

Rivarossi 2935 - Corridor 3rd Class Coach 14250

Rivarossi 2931 - Corridor 3rd Class Coach 14250

I recently had the good fortune to come across this Rivarossi 'Royal Scot' Class locomotive plus six coaches in a local charity shop.

All of the items were boxed and hardly seem to have been used. It has since been tested on our layout and the loco runs extremely well and the whole train looks quite stunning.

Rivarossi, an Italian company that began life in 1945, later became a part of the Lima group and they found quite a large market in the US.

In 1977 they decided to try and break into the UK market but, for some reason, they failed to understand the importance of the scale difference between HO and OO and, as a result, they produced models that sat somewhere between the two. This meant that their models looked too small when compared to their OO gauge equivalents.

This is a shame because the quality of their models was outstanding and, had they decided upon OO gauge from the start, they could have developed quite a following in the UK as well.

All of the above items, plus Hector's sister loco 6100 'Royal Scot' and two further LMS coaches, were all produced around 1978 / 1979 but some were still in the Rivarossi catalogue some ten years' later.

All of the coaches came with clip-in corridor end boards plus replacement tension lock couplings while the locos came with just the one replacement coupling plus a bag of accessories. 

The founder of the company, Alessandro Rivarossi, died in 2010 and Rivarossi is now part of Hornby International.