Between 2003-2005 if not mistaken, hornby had a go at making a live steam model in ho/oo gauge
They made a handful of designs including
Mallard
Silver link
Silver fox
Papyrus
The flight Scotsman
Flight Scotsman double tender (only 1000 made)
Dwight D Eisenhower
Golden Fleece
These things are an absolute thing of beauty having 4 of them
Not ran in 5 years but today with some track that has arrived
I fired up the silver link and without a problem ran like a watch
Sadly these things never caught up as people who bought them put them off as to hard to use. It’s a shame as these models had so much potential but sadly not a lot of people noticed it :/
i think the main issue was that they run on a separate control system that was incompatible with anything else. (although the technical reasons for this are understandable)
Another issue I remember with the hornby live steam was that although they could be run alongside electric motored locomotives, the tracks could be connected to each other for transfer of passenger and freight stock.
Any connections between neighbouring tracks had to be fully isolated from each other, tracks with standard 12 volt locomotives could remain electrically connected unless electrofrog turnouts were in use.
I think also, the live steam system also used a higher voltage although I am not sure on this as I could never afford a set due to the impossible amount of money required to buy it often around £500+.
I cannot remember the name of the youtube channel now, however, keying in oo gauge live steam locomotive on google might reveal some available videos. In the videos, parts from flying scotsman or mallard locomotives are moved around a little so that they fit into metal bodies and scratch built metal chassis to create more locomotives.
Other locomotives featured include a 9F, Baltic 4-6-4 tank locomotive snd I think an S15 or Lord Nelson class locomotive.
I used to have one. Mallard. It needed a fake of ten coaches to settle down but once one had the ten coaches on it was easy to control. Used to run (By carefully conserving steam) double the time the .annual said it would run, and was quite easy (For me) to master.
I bought mine for £400 by looking around, but not long after the sets were £250, and then they were disscontinued. When I found myself without an income and a mortgage to pay, it had to go and a friend bought it. I hadn't used it much so it still had its original water and a spare bottle I had bought. (Not much left in the original bottle). Bottle of oil had hardly gone down as it didn't use much.
My friend thought I was pulling a fast one on him for asking £250 for it (Which it was more than worth because of the few extra things it had and by then eBay examples were quickly going up to double that...)
Yet I honestly don't know what he did to it as he said he could hardly get it to work. I went down one evening, got it running and he marvelled at it, but when he tried it, he kept turning it off to stop the loco instead of altering the regulator to slow it down. The thing would do a fair few laps of the large oval of track before it even started to slow! Though he had coaches of old Triang origions, I offered him mine for a bargain price as I had slowly bought LNER coaches and I think ended up with 11 and had fitted them with modern wheels (Some of which I later returned to original silver seal wheels) by the thought they were expensive at around £8 each which I had paid each second-hand and £10-£12 each (Unboxed from trainsets) new. But he just couldn't get the hang of it despite being a railwayman. He put it up his attic and though he tried to run it a few times, he never successfully got it to run. (He mentioned having to buy new rubber gaskets for the water filler etc.).
Really, there is nothing much too it. If one has run a Mamod traction engine, steam car or steam roller or steam locomotive etc, one will find the Hornby live steam locos a doddle.
I found this thread last night as I am still new to the forum and still navigating my way around.
Hornby live steam and other live steam locomotives of all gauges have been an interest if mine for quite a long time since before Hornby introduced their live steam range and I felt that there was potentially something I could contribute to the thread.
As previously mentioned in my post above, I always wanted 1 of these sets but the high costs were and in a lot of cases still are prohibitive even though I keep hoping that someday I will find 1 at a price I can afford, the search continues.
