Following hot on the heels of the refurbished Hornby Class 50 is the unrefurbished version in corporate blue and yellow livery. Named locos in this configuration are exactly what I want for my late 1970s modelling, so this release has been eagerly awaited. As feared, the errors in the cab window area are more visible when painted yellow, but the model is such a mammoth improvement over the outgoing Lima offering that I think I can live with that in the short term.
The big spotting feature of the unrefurbished machines is the dirty great chunk missing from the roof (stick around here and learn all the technical terms) visible in the photo. The big spotting feature of the Hornby model is the dirty great gap around the crude, opening cab doors. Something will have to be done about these, one day, but again the machine looks mighty fine as it is when trundling around the layout.
A word of warning when fitting your DCC chip to these locos - installing it as directed will cause a short-circuit. Whether this will blow anything up I don't know, as like a good little soldier I tested it on the programming track first, but it's useless as supplied. It'll work if you plug the chip in back-to-front, but there's obviously something very wrong here, and clearly Hornby have never properly tested it using DCC.
Once you've had a good play and got it out of your system, I'd suggest that throwing the circuit board away completely and hard-wiring the decoder would be the best route. Like the Bachmann Class 37 it suffers from random flickering of lights that are supposed to be off. There are an awful lot of components on the board that you don't need under DCC, especially capacitors, so if you're confident enough to wire in a few resistors with the LEDs then starting from scratch is probably the easiest way to go.