Tiffany -
My wife would love someone to go clean my trainroom, but I don't allow anyone, including her, up there to do that. The hotties wouldn't worry her because she knows I find most young women, physically attractive or not, annoying.
As to the MTH locos having plastic detail, I don't know if "plastic" is the right word. Anyway, the photo below of my 5012 and 2921, both MTH. The actual castings seem to be identical, regardless of if in the real world the loco boilers were: both measure 14.94 (14 and 15/16ths inch) from front edge of boiler to back edge of cab side) as shown. (The 2921 looks smaller in this picture because it is both above and a foot behind 5012). By comparison (not shown) the Legacy ATSF 3751 measures 14 inches - these are a scale 45 inches longer than that big guy. They are huge. As to the plastic, many of the added on parts on both, including the two pipes (heavy red arrows) and some stuff on the front of the boiler details, don't feel and look quite like normal diecast metal. Not sure plastic is the right word, though. They feel like either a very light pot- or lead-based type of metal or a very hard ABS. They don't conduct electricity but that could be that they are just painted heavily - I wasn't going to scratch those parts of test them well with a multimeter. Regardless they are nice models which I bought mostly for display: among my favorite real world locos.
Getting back to the Vision Hudson and the theme of this thread, these two big guys are 15/16 inch longer than the Legacy Northern, which if you look at the earlier photo where I attached measurements (it is the fourth loco at the bottom in that picture), is quite a bit bigger than the Hudson and Blue Comet - so these two would drawf them. As I said - the Hudson (and Blue Comet) I think of as quarter horses and these big guys as Clydesdales.
I've always considered the Hudson J1 more like the English locomotives than western-US locomotives like these two. It seems to me it had more in common as to size, type of routes, and design for high speed rather than power at low speed, with the Gresley A3 Pacifics and such, even if it was not quite as fast as the fastest of those.
