Personally I'd go for the Bachmann body on a scale chassis (Comet?), but only if I was modelling in EM or P4, otherwise the Bachmann loco is a very hard act to beat (looks great, runs well)
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. The Ks kit (assuming you could find one) would need a huge amount of work before it would look anything like as good, and the Ks kits I built all ran poorly
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, no matter how hard I tried. The other consideration is cost of course - you could probably get 2 Bachmann locos for the price of 1 kit!
I think Malcolm Mitchell does a "state of the art" 45XX kit as well, I'm sure it's brilliant but I've no experience of his kits.
Ks were ultimately taken over by Autocom (based in Andover I think) but they seem to have stopped advertising now - Tower Models of Blackpool and/or The West Coast Kit Centre (see ads in Railway Modeller) are still advertising some kits for sale.
Hope I haven't put you off! These days I still build loco kits, but I concentrate on the prototypes that I'm fairly sure will never appear rtr (as a Southern Region modeller, I still have plenty of choice!)
Good luck with the layout!
I think Malcolm Mitchell does a "state of the art" 45XX kit as well, I'm sure it's brilliant but I've no experience of his kits.
Ks were ultimately taken over by Autocom (based in Andover I think) but they seem to have stopped advertising now - Tower Models of Blackpool and/or The West Coast Kit Centre (see ads in Railway Modeller) are still advertising some kits for sale.
Hope I haven't put you off! These days I still build loco kits, but I concentrate on the prototypes that I'm fairly sure will never appear rtr (as a Southern Region modeller, I still have plenty of choice!)
Good luck with the layout!
