Sold March 2024 Back to Archive

Pictures opposite and words below are from that time, the video below was taken in recent days.

We first bought this engine back in August 2010 - built by Eric Lowe, it was the first Standard Class 4 tank completed to the Doug Hewson design.

The engine went to the Midland Model Engineering Exhibition with us in October of that year, it still holds the SRS record for "most number of people who wanted to buy an engine off the stand in the first hour after opening"!

Unfortunately (for them, at least) the engine was already promised to a friend of ours, a retired BR driver who drove Class 4s back in the day. He renumbered the engine to match the one he used to drive himself, then sat back and admired it in between occasional outings - the engine has been steamed five times in the past eleven years.

Before it left us last time we tested it and Steve borrowed it for the weekend to run at his club in Sale - "Probably the best engine I've driven" were his words on Monday morning when he returned. There's a short video of the engine on his YouTube channel here, showing both the engine in action and how far phone cameras have come since 2010.

A finely made locomotive, completed in 1992 it still runs beautifully. Paint is on the good side of "working clothes", which suits the engine, the chassis remains in good order throughout

A well-known, bordering on legendary design, Doug's original build series ran for 93 instalments in "Engineering in Miniature". Highly detailed, it quickly got a reputation as being complex and difficult to build, something of a "Mount Everest" of model engineering. Consequently, whilst a good number have been started over the years, very few have been completed - even fewer that run as well as this one.