Hornby GWR 4-4-0 'County' Class
R3061
The 'County' Class was introduced by Churchward in 1904 as an express passenger loco for use over the Bristol and South Wales lines. However, this work was quickly taken over by members of the ‘Star’ Class. 40 of the 'Counties' were built, the last at Swindon in 1912. No longer required for the purpose for which they were built, they took on civil engineering trains and pilot duties where there were weight restrictions. The last of them was withdrawn from service in 1933 and so none of them passed to British Railways.
The model was one of four 4-4-0 tender locomotives released by Hornby in 1981 and the model remained in production until 1995. During this time five versions of it were made before it went into retirement. With plans to add it to the RailRoad range in 2011, the model was modified to turn it from a tender-drive model to a loco-drive one and at the same time it was fitted with a DCC decoder socket to make it ‘DCC ready’ The loco and tender now come joined as one, with a permanent DCC connection to the decoder socket in the tender. The first version for the RailRoad range is 3821 County of Bedford - unfortunately a name used on the first model in 1981.