Horsetan

I suspect that's partly to do with the peculiarities of motive power policy and needs in Northern Ireland, which is not like Britain or Portugal.

The Heljan website does have a spares page, but there's currently nothing of note in it.

Something similar happened to the New Zealand rugby team in 1995 just before they were about to play the final against South Africa. There was much said at the time about whether the food poisoning was deliberate.

I see the signal lamp hasn't been lit....probably no need as there's no night services.

Neither did I....

Either that or food poisoning

I think the lads have enough on their plate after the Heljan takeover. Heljan spare parts used to be quite easy to obtain via Gaugemaster, but I don't know what the arrangement is now after the takeover.

Mexico are on home turf. They're not the ones needing to acclimatise....

Life being what it is these days, it's not inconceivable that the "someone else" is also hoping to make a quick buck on eBay...

Not started well. I have to repair the pickup strips which became detached from both sides of the bogie gear casing when I levered out the wheels for a look...

Ah, I forgot Bill Bedford still had a few etches. He used to do rather more than that, but never any instructions. I ran into Bill at ExpoEM; his focus is on 3D prints rather than etches. His output seems to be quite low these days and he hasn't been in the best of health in recent years. I'm hoping he might revisit his experimental range of 3D printed P4 driving wheels in the next few years, as there's one type I particularly need.

In a word, no. There's nothing other than SSM and maybe the occasional batch run by @Maynerfocusing on purely Irish stock. The Bredin kits might become available again if Des can be assured of between minimum 6 and 10 orders - preferably paid-for upfront - for each type. I'm just disappointed to have missed out on a Bredin 3rd; that avenue is dead unless anyone has an unbuilt kit they might sell. Etching still has a place because nothing else represents sheet metal as well as...sheet metal!

The resulting hybrid of different parts looks a bit off...

Neville's big problem with all of the Backwoods kits concerns wheels, as the original maker/supplier of the mostly plastic-centred, fine-profile wheelsets no longer exists. From the one loco kit that has been re-released, it looks like the old-style coarse profile "steamroller" wheels - inherited from N-gauge in the 1980s and earlier - are now being used, so this retrograde step is likely to find its way into all of the kits over the next decade or so. Backwoods kits are going to look a bit odd with them, given that a big selling point was the fact that the running gear didn't look prehistoric.

I wonder why it was arranged that way?