Phoebe Snow Route posted:I’m looking to purchase my first tinplate set from England and have narrowed it down between Darstaed and ACE Trains London. I would like to know if anyone has any opinion on either one or both of these companies as to the quality of the trains, service, US distributors, etc. I’ve never seen either of these manufacturers in person and have only been able to view Youtube videos. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks to all.
I own several Darstaed and Ace trains. I have a Darstaed streamlined Pacific A-4, Sir Nigel Gresley and an ACE Evening Star 9f 2-10-0 along with two sets of Darstaed Gresley Teak passenger cars and a string of ACE goods wagons. Both manufacturers produce a high quality tinplate product. The locomotives are diecast with stamped sheet metal tenders. All of the cars are lithographed tinplate, cut and folded with die cast trucks. They have hook type couplers which are fiddly at best to connect with adult fingers. Both makes have 20 or 24 volt DC motors with no bridge rectifier so you cannot run them with a Lionel transformer as they are all AC and will fry the motors instantly. I have installed Electric RR (Lionel owned) TMCC boards in both of my locomotives so I can in fact run them in command mode. You have to buy the DC Commander unit. Anyone with the manual dexterity of an oyster or better can do the conversion in about 2 hours. I did not install any sound cards in these locos, just TMCC. The locos have great gear trains, are smooth runners but do tend to slip with long passenger trains as they do not have traction tires on the drivers. I have purchased some from a distributor in the U.K. Price wise, with shipping, etc. it is slightly cheaper to buy them from the UK with the dollar being so strong against the pound at present. You can buy directly from ACE and they will deduct 16 1/2% value added tax from the listed price which will just about pay for shipping from the UK to the U.S.
The freight and passenger cars don't have a lot of added on detail as they are built like toy trains were in the 1920's and 1930's, printed, tin plated steel. The cars appear, in photographs to have ribs, angle iron and rivets, panels, etc. but all of this is printed on and the car sides are flat. These trains are 1/43rd scale as opposed to 1/48th scale used by American train makers, however even with the larger scale, the British locomotives look small compared to a Lionel Hudson or Big Boy. I, personally like them and run them along side my semi scale Lionel equipment. As with most toy trains, they are manufactured in China, Taiwan and some work is done in Thailand. Quality is good and I have a pre-order in for the ACE Black 5 (LMS 4-6-0) which will be available later this year.
You may want to check out thestationmastersrooms.uk for 360 degree photos of ACE and Darstaed equipment. They have new and secondary market equipment that is no longer being manufactured.
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