Considerable funds I'd set aside to buy things like Class 44s have now been squandered on US products such as this Life-Like Proto 2000 model of a GP30 diesel. These can be picked up for between £2 and £8 more than the amount I paid for my Bachmann Deltic, depending on the roadname required, and are so far ahead in the quality stakes that it's difficult to believe that the GP30 is actually the much older product.
Strangely, there is an ever-vocal minority in the hobby over here that will bend over backwards to excuse any third-rate products released into the UK market, no matter how poor they are. Their logic, if you can call it that, seems to be that if they're not too discerning about what they buy then nobody else should be allowed to be, either. I must confess I find this self-centredness both arrogant and obnoxious - they've got 30 years of shoddy rubbish to choose from already. Don't be greedy, kiddies...
Of course, even in the US market £50-£60 doesn't buy you perfection. Coming, as it does, from the same factory as the Hornby Class 50, the GP30 is about as DCC ready as a chocolate eclair, despite the presence of an NMRA socket on the highly questionable circuit board. The lights, it goes without saying, don't match the trademark EssPee style in the slightest. Yet even though there is much work that the modeller can do, it's a very good model straight out of the box and won't look out of place if I don't get around to enhancing it in the next year or ten.
For the enthusiastic detailer, the US market is absolutely awash with high quality aftermarket parts such as these fan assemblies from Cannon. I'm indebted to Tony Sissons for these photos and agree with him entirely - they really are absolutely superb and I can't wait for mine to turn up. There is nothing comparable available in the UK market, indeed many detail parts are very poor and look less accurate than the moulded components they're supposed to replace.
A common bit of whitewash put about by the spin-doctors of the mediocrity lobby is "it's a good job that XXXX has errors, what would the real modeller do if models were 100% perfect?" Ignoring the somewhat offensive implication that sticking whitemetal blobs to dodgy locos is all there is to the hobby, and skipping the rather obvious answer that getting off your *rse and building a layout might be a neat idea, I'm left wondering just how these folk could be so completely ignorant of what goes on beyond these shores? As standards have edged closer to this unattainable perfection in the US, the detailing component market has mushroomed as you'd expect, rather than curling up it's toes and dying. The range of high quality parts available from any one of a number of US manufacturers is bigger than the whole lot of ours rolled into one, and you can literally build a loco from the ground up using individually sourced components, right down to the bodyside (hood) doors and cabs. It seems to me there are no losers, or am I missing something?