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Well, what can you say about Sir William Stanier's Black 5? A superb bit of design, it looks right, could go virtually anywhere hauling virtually anything. The Black 5 was ubiquitous on the former LMS system.

My version is the first of the Hornby 'Super Detailed' models with a factory light weathering. As you can see, it is 44781 in unlined black. This was one of the last steam engines to survive on BR, but unfortunately did not survive into preservation.

The model is finely detailed and a vast improvement on the old tender drive version. If I were to criticize anything, it would be the lack of pipework detail and injector under the cab sides. However, I have fitted these from commercially available parts. The other would be 'plastic coal'. I replaced this with something better, real coal! Nothing quite looks like coal, other than real coal in my opinion.

As supplied, the model is DCC Ready, with an 8 pin socket in the boiler, just about were the top feed is. With the release of Hornby's TTS sound chips, I thought this would be an excellent candidate. Having bought the decoder, I immediately ran into problems. These earlier versions of the Black 5 simply do not have the space in the boiler to accommodate the sound chip, let alone the speaker! The later versions apparently have a slightly different wiring system and the decoder and speaker are installed in the tender. However, this doesn't help me.

So, having had a look at the problem, I decided to to fit my TTS decoder and speaker in the tender as well. This involved a few modifications. The tender does pick up power and this is transmitted to the locomotive through sprung contacts either side of the coupling. I disconnected the wires from the motor and the DCC socket. Two new thin black wires were run from the motor and out underneath the fall plate by the coupling.

The tender body was removed as well as the large weight. The motor wires were run from the locomotive up through a specially drilled hole in the tender base. I then cut of the plug from the decoder, leaving a good length on the tails. The red and black decoder wires were solder to the pick up tabs in the tender. The motor wires, grey and orange, were connected to the black wires I had run from the locomotive. The assembly was tested and worked! So now it was a case of tidying up. The decoder, wrapped in one layer of Sellotape as recommended by Hornby, was fixed to the tender base by a double sided sticky pad. The speaker was fixed on top of the decoder by the same method. A tidy up of the wires and the tender body was put back. Now I have a Black 5 with sound.

Some people have noticed that their TTS decoders did not work very well with the older Black 5's such as mine. Complaints of stopping and the sound resetting seemed to be common. I too suffered this at first, but was found to be dirty pick up contacts. Having cleaned these up, it works perfectly.