East Road has a new member to the fleet in the form of a Class 20, 20049. It has been a long time coming!

The loco was purchased as 20080 from Andy Pannett, the then owner of Castlebank Sidings.

It has been renumbered as 20049 (which was an Eastfield allocated loco) mainly due to the fact that this variant of the Heljan model, does not actually cater for the deeper cab side windows that were fitted to two batches of Class 20 locos, 20028-034 and 20070-127. The deeper cabside windows were fitted to facilitate the use of the Tablet Catcher mechanism that were fitted to the batches. They were fitted directly under the modified cabside windows (both sides) to enable easier access to the Tablet token for use on single line sections, mainly in the Scottish regions.

Surprisingly, the loco is fitted with a 21 pin Zimo sound decoder loaded with the Digitrains Class 20 soundfile. I am not a fan of Zimo but after much fettling with the motor control CV’s, the locomotive is running very smoothly. A clip of the loco, running as 20080, has been uploaded to the YouTube channel.