Technical

Greetings. I will keep it as short as possible. I am located in India. I do not know how many Live Steam Mallards made their way to India, but atleast I bought one brand new back when Hornby was still making them.

Some years ago it stopped working so I contacted Hornby & they sent me a Superheater seal. Back then I signed up to the old OOLS forum & managed to get the seal installed with some difficulty as my banjo bolt underneath the superheater is stuck & won't come off. After that the Motor unit stopped working(led are working fine & loco receives the signal from controller). I was afraid I would damage it so gave up on it & put it away.

Fast forward to 2018, I moved to a new house & finally a week or so earlier got my Mallard out of the box(I still have the original box) & placed it in my cabinet. The loco looked beautiful & I thought its a shame its not in running order & decided to give it another try. My notes below.

1. Unscrewed the Superheater & loosened the safety valve from the base(the banjo still wont budge) to make sure the seal is not binding. Motor still did not respond, so we can rule that out.

2. The motor unit itself- There is a strange material(like cardboard) between the rotor & the magnet. I thought it was debris so got a toothpick & used it as a scraper. Used minimum force & it started coming off, a little while later much to my horror realised it was not debris & apparently is supposed to be there. Did I damage the motor unit?

3. I had removed a lot of things to get to this point(PCB, Safety Valve screws, Super heater screws, the banjo bolt screw) so I was getting a bit worried about being able to put it back together. Thankfully I was able to put it all back together the way it was.

4. The motor still won't respond. Loco steams up fine & saw some steam escaping through the whistle port.

I need some advice from the members here at this point. I like looking at my Mallard sitting in the cabinet(on the rolling road) every now & then so I am happy to have it sit there rather than destroy it trying to fix it.

But the loco looks so pretty & sometimes I feel that it deserves to run again.

What would you do? I can try & contact Hornby, but do not know whether they still repair these locos or not. I would also have to consider packing it so that it does not get damaged in transit.

I guess my loco being one of the (very)few Hornby live steams to land in India(maybe its the only one) makes me bit emotional about it.

Regards,

Kaustav