| The DMCOs carry the “A FirstGroup and MTR Company” branding that has since disappeared off the real units. On a quick look against photos the markings and paint colour boundaries appear to be correctly placed, but I need to spend much longer on this with a more comprehensive set of photos. The colours appear credible to my eyes, though maybe the light grey is a small fraction too dark and the blue-grey a small fraction too blue. I suspect fractionally not enough scale compression of colour has been applied, but we are well into the territory of individuals’ differing colour perception. The passenger saloon windows appear to be lightly smoked, but opinions differ between whether they are smoked or clear on the real trains. In my experience the windows’ appearance depends upon the prevailing lighting conditions. Can any member authoritively settle this matter?
My model ran very well indeed at differing speeds straight out of the box, and on DC the directional and other lights worked correctly. I mention this because purchases in recent years of MU models from another well-known model manufacturer have not. [UPDATE 11th November 2025: I subsequently bought a second version – to make up an 8 car formation – and the red directional lights did not work on one cab end. This model has now been returned for an exchange to a hopefully fully working version. Unfortunately Bachmann now also appear prone to dodgy Chinese electronics.] This model comes with a pack of inter-car electrically conducting couplers of the “spear” type (which unlike on some recent other Bachmann MU models fit together and take apart easily), a loudspeaker enclosure and its fixings, cab front air dams and Delner couplings to fix in place of the tension lock couplings (which are bogie mounted), cab front air pipes and three part dummy inter-car power and control cable looms (for use when the model is on static display). |
