Hornby Class 56 R2645x in BR Rail Blue.

 A Hornby Class 56 R2645x in British rail blue (or is it?).

 I have had this for some years so, today decided to get her out from her box and tinker, like one does.

Well, it wasn't to be quite that easy, she had seized solid. All the grease had dried out and resembled something like chalk. Stripping her to bits and a good clean up she now runs. I can not get her to crawl, on step 1 she's off. I have tried changing some of the CVs but that just resulted her to stutter. Setting CV8 to 8 has put her back to her factory settings, we are back to her taking off like a Greyhound on heat.

Lets bare in mind that she has not been out of the box for years and is basically a brand new loco. Lets see how she runs on good old DC, i took the decoder out and replaced it with a blanking plug. She hummed and whined, the knob on 3 before any movement was had.

I'll let her run in for a bit, both forward and reverse, this motor is getting very warm! Removing the motor, everything was running very freely as it should.

I was aware that Hornby Class 56 had problems. It was suggested to remove the rubber band that drives the roof fans, improved things slightly. Another suggestion was to remove the Capacitors on the PCB, another slight improvement but still what i would like.

Ok, i bit the bullet and put the sound decoder back in, she runs like a dream.

The myth that "if it wont run on DC, it ain't goin to run on DCC" is not always the case.

Remember i said she was bought new. There seems to be a few discrepancies here.

56 013 yes that's right, the 'skirts' on the lower buffer beam corners are different than on the actual model. You will also notice that it should have round buffers as depicted in the picture.

 Nothing about sound fitted ?        

It would seem that this one may be a 'Heinz 57'  Well, perhaps not 57 varieties but at least 3 that i can tell. part Romanian, part Donnington and part, i can't remember the Third place they were built. Your comments please.

Buffers i can replace but the corner wraparound part may be a problem as its part of the chassis. There are probably some other detail differences that i have yet to notice.

Not to be put off to much by all of this from Hornby, Grrrrrr! and of course, no chance in sending her back now, oh yes, while i think about it, the lights don't work either, even after playing around with those stupid brass tags that Hornby insisted on using, even hardwiring the dam things in and 'NOTHING' Grrrrrr.

Rant over.

She was far to shiny so after a bit of weathering, adding the air pipes, i think she looks the part.