A lot of thought has gone into this locomotive and the result is a reasonably accurate representation of the pre-war A4s. The laudable aim must have been to keep the price as low as possible and for £750 you will get a loco that is basically in two parts: a heavy 0-6-0 chassis made of metal and a well detailed plastic bodyshell plus front bogie and pony truck. The loco comes attached by four screws to a base of mdf and is well packed. Be careful when detaching it from its base – there’s likely to be quite a lot of oil which will get onto your fingers (or cotton gloves) and then onto the locomotive. I found it best to lie the loco on its side on a piece of foam (track underlay will do) and remove the securing screws horizontally. Putting them back is quite a different matter. One of the bucket seats had become detached in transit and the treads on the left hand side at the front of the loco fell off as I took it out of the box. It wouldn’t take much to remedy these minor blemishes.

Photo courtesy of National Railway Museum archive

Let’s look at the bodyshell first. The overall impression is good: some of the detail is excellent – for example the thin pipe running from the valve above the nameplate is modelled separately, the lettering round the hole for the crank to open the cod’s mouth is there, the Canadian coat of arms on the cab is in full colour, all the items you would expect are on the streamlined casing including handles to open the small hatches along the side and the lubricators on the fireman’s side. The brass cover to the end of the return crank is a nice touch. There is also a reasonable representation of the backhead in the cab and attached to the rear left-hand driving wheel a superfluous speedometer. Be careful with the lamp irons – they are quite delicate. Thank goodness Hatton’s didn’t model the bell!

However, there is a downside to all this, and it is that this is a plastic moulding and it looks like it, especially the cab roof, which has all the correct detail but no real depth, and the sliding ventilators are not replicated inside the cab; outside the cab, the Canadian coat of arms is printed on, and the wind-deflecting glasses are fixed at the fully open position. I suspect that the cut-out numbers are slightly oversize. The cab is also missing a handrail to match that on the tender. This has already been drawn to the attention of Hatton’s and is referred to on their website. The fall plate is a separate item which the purchaser has to attach. It has to be pretty deep to cover the gap between the loco and the tender and is of very thin metal (brass I think) with two tiny lugs to make the connection on the loco. When you pick the loco up, unless you are careful to hold it by the boiler you are aware that the valances are yielding between your thumb and fingers.

Now to the chassis. The front bogie and the rear pony truck are very light, both held down by a spring and with push-fit wheels. In the case of the bogie, there is nothing on the underside of the frame to locate it, so the bogie’s movement is very flexible. There is one important omission – on the front of the bogie there are no splash guards. They were eventually taken off and replaced by a splashguard that extended right across the front of the bogie but not until after the war The pony truck spring is located at both ends but the attempt to replicate the movement of a Cartazzi axlebox means that there is a tremendous amount of play, which, on the loco under review led to derailment in both directions on a PECO double slip. I have two of these, completely unaltered, and it happened on both. I also found it quite difficult to sit the loco on the track because of the way the pony truck hides beneath the extended rear frames. The cylinder drainpipes are neatly clipped together and fastened to the front guard irons, except that the guard irons are fixed to the cylinder drain pipes. Presumably this is to allow the loco to deal with sharp (3ft 6in) curves. You have to look pretty closely to see that the irons are not attached to the loco. The brake gear comes as a separate attachment but the sandpipes are fixed, the ones for the centre drivers of the loco under review being at a rather odd angle: they would deposit sand on the sleepers alongside the track. I looked up the Guild recommended standards for wheels to check the back-to-back measurements. They go for 29mm. Slater’s wheels are at 29.2mm. The bogie wheels on this loco are at 29.1mm, the front driver is at 29.6mm, the middle driver is 29.7mm, the rear driver is 29.9mm and the pony truck is 29.5mm. This might explain the rather bumpy ride round my track which has a mixture of PECO and handmade turnouts. The bogie and pony truck wheels could easily be adjusted and fixed. The need to negotiate really tight curves has meant that there is a huge amount of slop on the centre driving wheels but once on the track this is not an issue – indeed, the weight of the loco at 1,650g (roughly 3lb 10oz) will certainly keep it there – there may be a problem with the other wheels though. For comparison, a Finescale Brass Jubilee weighs 1000g (roughly 2lb 2oz).

Separating the bodyshell from the chassis is not easy. There are seven stages – the final stage (no 7) relating to the expansion link bracket is quite difficult, and it is made worse by the fact that the speedometer cable is attached to the chassis and the bodyshell. I gave up.

The tender weighs in at 620g (roughly 1lb 6oz) – the Finescale Brass Jubilee tender is 500g (roughly 1lb 2oz). The one used by 4489 came from an A3 and had been provided for the non-stop Flying Scotsman service. As such it had beading round the edges of the sides and the model tender is spot on. These tenders were gradually modified over the years with the fairings reduced and eventually removed. Certainly in 1937 Dominion of Canada had the full whack but it’s difficult to ascertain when the tender arrived at the state portrayed by the model, with only a small curved fairing at the front and none at the back. However, I doubt whether the rear plate was ever 3in thick. Coal for the tender comes as a separate attachment. It doesn’t look a bit like coal, is quite a push to get in and impossible to get out. I wasn’t sure whether the doors on the loco and tender were supposed to be movable, so I didn’t try. Finally, on the body, there are two cupboards attached to the front plate, and airbrake hoses attached to the buffer beam both of which came later. There is a dummy buckeye coupling. A loose screw coupling is provided for running with your stock but it wouldn’t take much to fit a sprung Kadee or screw coupling.

As for the undercarriage, the claim that pickup is from all wheels is not quite true (I think it’s safe to exclude the bogie and pony truck). There are wiper pickups to the back of all eight tender wheels, but because of the amount of side play built in (2mm front and rear wheels), not all the wipers are in contact all of the time: however there should always be at least two contacts on each side to provide power to the motor. The coupling between the tender and the loco has three positions: the widest gives a scale gap of about 1ft 6in, then about 1ft 3in and finally, about 8in.

On performance, apart from the problems outlined above, the loco did well. It ran smoothly at slow speeds and easily managed a rake of six Kirk coaches at speed.

So what are we to think of this new loco on the block? And at whom is it aimed? It is virtually impossible to compare it (at £750) with any of the other A4s on offer: a DJH top of the range is £4225, a Golden Age is £2950, and if you want to build your own, kits go up to over £1000 if you include a good motor and wheels. But you get what you pay for. I think the problem with Hatton’s A4 – and possibly the A3 as well – is that so many compromises have been made to keep the price down and make it flexible enough to go round 3ft 6in curves that what we have is in reality an O Gauge trainset loco which could easily become the basis of an even better representation of these famous locomotives. I would start with the shiny treads at the front of the running plate!