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Hattons	Jack Morgan
17 Montague Road	0151 733 3655
Widnes
WA8 8FZ	Email: jmorgan@hattons.co.uk
	Web: http://www.hattons.co.uk

Although my compact Kew Gardens layout (please see Kew Green in the Guild Forum layouts) mostly operates with LSWR and GWR stock, I was tempted by the announcement of Hatton's excursion into O gauge RTR coaches, albeit of a more northerly origin. My station (as with the original prototype) has a Bay for special KG excursion traffic, in this case via the North London line.

The price cut last year, from £249 to £179 also interested me, one advantage of an actual competitive situation regarding O gauge RTR bogie coaches. However, these coaches lack LED lighting, unlike others. They are of plastic construction, well suited to panelled coaching stock, dimensionally 420mm (60ft prototype) over headstocks, 440mm overall, 290mm (41ft 6in.) bogie centres and with 8ft 6in. Gresley 'light' bogies. They appear accurate, apart from the doors, (see photo) where the window has shrunk and the ventilator above has grown! This is remarked upon in a guild RTR Forum thread, and on RMweb. Altering this with files, piercing saws and filler is possible, but the window will look half open…I probably won't.

A more practical issue is coupling. The sprung hook has a good representation of a non-working buckeye, which the Heljan Mk 1 could have done with. Each coach is supplied with a pair of screw couplings, with authentic left/right threads. These can unscrew themselves and fall apart in tunnels or on unreachable stretches of track. The good news is you can screw them up tight and they will still allow enough gap for these coaches on PECO R2 curves. Coupling the coaches together took me five minutes each pair, on the nearest siding to my baseboard edge. The wise will keep them in rakes, only varying the coupling of motive power to them.

I bought two BCKs and a corridor third, all that my platforms will take. At 900g per coach, that's all my locos, e.g. a 1kg Lionheart pannier, will manage on my curves. With greater radii I think you could add a coach.

For information, these coaches have larger buffer heads than my Heljan Mk 1s and are shorter, so that my rake can be also propelled around my layout, including R2-to-straight transitions, though this is less nail-biting where I've been able to incorporate transition curves.

There have been issues with quality control, so Hatton’s graded the stock A-D, with £9/£19/£29 discounts if a coach has 1/2/3 faults. Hatton’s has had to inspect each coach. I ordered grade A stock, but my third came with a missing vacuum brake tell-tale, an orange paddle. A quick call got me a £9 refund and a £4 voucher, so I think Hatton’s have handled customer service well. I hope the criticism does not deter them from future O gauge special editions because that would be a shame.