New Railway Modellers Forums

I'm with Bigmet here. I have a class 47 and a class 52 Western. Both came with brass wheels and both ended up getting Ultrascale wheel sets. Turned them in to expensive models but they've never given any pick up troubles since. I later on bought a pair of class 27's, also Heljan and they came with Nickel Silver wheels.

All my Heljan is later product with the nickel silver wheelsets, and these are completely reliable. (That's except the class 16 which had a very ill advised deviation from Heljan's standard method for mounting the pick up wipers, now fixed by using the method Heljan use on all their other models I have seen. Why designers have to mess around a perfectly satisfactory arrangement I'll never know...)

The earlier brass wheeled product - I know several people who bought the class 47 from first production batches from 2001 onwards - these ran reliably if used frequently as the oxide polishes off. But put them away for a year or three, and they often need to re-polish the tyres and wiper tracks on the wheels to get going. That's why I devised the 'flying leads' start, once running enough current got through to let them run round the layout and thoroughly 'polish up'.