Hornby R2994XS BR Late Castle Class Clun Castle

Hornby Clun Castle DCC sound, 17th Dec 2011

Reviewer: Royston Lacey

I would have given the loco 5 stars but there are one or two annoying things that I will come to later, on the plus side, this is a beautiful locomotive finely detailed by Hornby, it runs very well at all speeds in both directions, the sounds are superb with the chuff chuff sound syncronised to the speed of the loco, so far, very impressive but there are two things that let the loco down in my opinion, one is the fiddley little plug that runs via wires from the loco and has to be plugged into a socket under the tender, not easy for someone with clumsy fingers like myself especially as the tender drawbar gets in the way, the other is the drawbar which has a slotted hole at the loco end which fits up into a spigot coming down from the loco footplate end, linking them together is easy off the track but trying to do it on track is very fiddley, also if you're not careful the drawbar keeps dropping away from the spigot which is most annoying, I do like the loco very much but when it costs over £200 you would expect Hornby to come up with a far better drawbar linkage system, I have an older Hornby Castle class loco and the tender to loco linkage is far superior.

Model Railways Direct: We have a tool to fit and remove the linking wire between the tender and loco which is X6468 Locomotive Plug Extractor Tool, this will make the job a little easier.