QUOTE The H & M one is often seen at Shows for sale at a reasonable price (last one I saw was a tenner)
Sorry dbclass50 and I know you used one and so did I but from personal experience I would not recommend the purchase of a secondhand H & M rolling road as it has brass rollers on one side and nylon rollers on the other which have too much lateral movement, wear unevenly giving inconsistent power pick up and causing loco wobble. When you think about it what would happen over time if you ran a loco on a track with a nylon rail on one side and a brass rail on the other? H & M produced quality engineered items. Unfortuneately their rolling road was not one of them!
The wheels on Hornby Live Steam locos can get a little hot with lots of moisture from real steam blowing from the cylinders. This would be a further handicap for the H & M rolling road with its nylon rollers and wood construction!
The Hornby rolling road performs much better with rollers made of the same material on both sides having no lateral movement and is a nicely engineered all metal product that I would have absolutely no hesitation in recomending to anybody!
If you can pick up an H & M rolling road for a tenner just as a running in instrument then fair enough but it will not offer the same solid performance and electrical conductivity for testing purposes as the Hornby version. On the other hand having spent £80 on a loco would you entrust a tool (a cheap secondhand rolling road) that induces wobble and power surging to help with the running in of said loco?
The H & M was fine for its day when all locos had a wobble anyway so you did not notice this trait in H & M rolling road!
Now that we are in 2007
and locos no longer wobble its shortcomings are very clear!
Also we have a lot of trader friends here. Do they really want their customers to plonk their brand new wobble free loco on a device that is going to induce a wobble "Triang Hornby M7 loco" style!
Is the Triang Hornby M7 0-4-4 loco the wobbliest loco ever built?
Happy modelling
Gary