Hi there,
Firstly, a big thanks for making this loco in N scale, and aiming high in terms of detail. I have one of these pre-ordered already
I’ve had a long look at the photos of the hand painted sample posted on TheRailWire, and I have some feedback:
- the cab window glazing looks messy (I’m hoping this is just because of the hand decorating/gluing). It looks like the window gaskets are painted silver (or maybe this is just glue). It would be great if the window gaskets could be black like the prototype, or worst-case unpainted.
- the holes drilled for the separate grabs are all of a significantly larger diameter than the wire grabs themselves, and to me this is really noticeable and detracts from the separately applied details.
- for this road number, the grabs on the top if the nose should be black to match the black antireflective panel (although other CN locos look to be red)
- two grabs on top of the nose (directly above the door) have been omitted — I assume this is a deliberate choice?
- the windscreen wipers on this road number should also be black (perhaps these could be moulded in black plastic or chemically treated if they are wire)
- the front handrail stanchions look bent, so hopefully this isn’t an issue on the final models
- the left MU receptacle box below the left porch-mounted ditch light has an incorrectly sized square panel (it should be much smaller and located upwards — the same size and proportion as the right-hand MU receptacle)
- the cab-mounted bell looks significantly over-scale (even allowing for the thick paint), given that this is so prominent, it needs to look right.
- the nose-mounted number boards look too prominent. In N scale I don’t think that it is a good choice to have a clear plastic “glass” layer over the numberboards. This is barely visible on the prototype and it makes the numberboards look too thick and “squinty” in N. I would go for thinner printed numberboards without the extra layer of plastic on top, with a printed representation of the black gasket around the numberboard. To me this would look a lot finer scale and ironically more detailed. Also, for this paint scheme the road numbers on the nose-mounted number boards should be reversed (i.e. white numbers on black background)
- for this ex-BCOL road number, the CN logo on the nose is too small and not correctly located (the C should intersect the left numberboard on the prototype)
- the rain strip above the cab windows should be painted black so that there is a continuous black surface from the cab roof to the sunshades
- the Sinclair “ice-skate” antenna is incorrectly located — it should be centred at the rear of the cab roof, with two smaller antennae forward (I’m assuming that this is a compromise of tooling the cab for the CN units, not the BCOL ones).
- the BCOL porch-mounted ditch lights are a very different (more bulky) design than the later CN versions — are you tooling finer/slope-fronted porch-mounted ditch lights for the CN ones?
Overall the shell looks good, and the underframe detail (especially the trucks, air tanks, and cabling on the sill) look excellent.
The challenge is that I think these units have a very distinctive “face” and if some of the above could be rectified, it would make this face look more accurate.
Thanks for all you time and effort.
Kind Regards
Tim Benson
