Something Really Different

It was on ebay and I won it for £38.50. It consisted of a Lima 0-6-0 4F three rail loco with three carriages and I reckon that was very good value for money especially as the condition was very good with no marks at all. The different bit is that this Lima loco has been converted to run as a Marklin digital loco complete with three rail skid and a digital chip and even more different it is in HO scale not OO. This would normally be a nightmare but as I run three or four Marklin HO trains on my layout anyway I thought that it would be worth a try. The Lima British outline HO trains were imported into the UK between 1973 and 1976 and are pretty rare but not really collected and as they don’t fit with the normal OO scale that is used in the UK. It is interesting to note that the UK OO scale is unique throughout the world as the rest of the world uses HO scale. The UK OO scale is thoroughly incorrect as it runs on HO scale track and is therefore overscale for the track that it runs on. There have been many attempts to convert the UK to HO, Trix, Lilliput and others have tried but the conservatism of the UK has always meant that OO has remained the scale of choice.

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The loco is interesting that after this conversion it runs very well on my track using a Marklin controller and reverses the Marklin way using a pulse from the controller. The connectors are also of the Marklin type. The coaches are LMS liveried and are totally fictitious as they are MK 1 coaches which were introduced by British Railways many years after LMS was nationalised. One of the coaches is a dining car., More information on the Lima HO range can be found here
The net result is an excellent runner, no hesitations anywhere, no problems with reversing and overall a very interesting addition to the layout. I forgot to mention that this a tender driven loco which normally I hate but this one makes an acceptable noise and runs very well with no de-railing problems. That makes two tender driven locos which are both acceptable.
I will be posting some pictures.
By no way is this an authentic addition to a Hornby Dublo layout but as my main interest is running it does make a new and different runner.

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