Graham Farish

Graham Farish are a very important company in the world of British N. They are the major producer of British profile ready-to-run locomotives and coaches. Like Peco they also sell goods wagons.

Bachmann Europe’s address is:

Bachmann Industries Europe Ltd.
Moat Way
Barwell
Leicestershire LE9 8EY
England

Phone: +44 1455 841756
Fax: +44 1455 841787

Web: http://grahamfarish.co.uk/

Their site is quite interesting, if only for one reason - they simply copied some of my information on British N standards and pasted it right into their own pages. Really. And, no, they didn’t ask. Very poor manners.

As a company Graham Farish was around for a long time - as far back as the 1950s. They used to sell OO gauge equipment, but discontinued their 00 products in the late 1970s or early 1980s in favour of building uniquely N gauge stock. At some point they switched names from Graham Farish to Grafar, then went back to trading under the name Graham Farish in 1978 or so. However, their corporate name remained Grafar Limited. Very confusing.

They sell steam and diesel locomotives, bogie passenger coaches, a variety of goods wagons, train sets for children and a handful of buildings. Additionally they sell locomotive chassis without bodies, and these are widely used by UK scratchbuilders and kit builders who purchase white metal bodies from other makers. They once sold track, but no longer do so - their pre-packaged train sets for children and beginners include Peco Setrack.

For a while they were the last British model train maker of any note, but in autumn 2000 they were bought out by Hong Kong-based Kader Industries (Bachmann). The Dorset factory was shut down and production moved entirely to China. Arguably this was rather sad for two reasons. First, the Farish factory was one of the few surviving British makers of model trains, and now they’re gone. And second, the quality of Graham Farish products has increased dramatically since the move to China, which isn’t a particularly cheerful statement on the quality of the aforementioned British manufacturing. Bachmann in North America is known for its poor-quality products, but Bachmann UK has been selling quite reasonable OO offerings - generally superior to the stuff from Hornby - and have upgraded the standards of their N output as well.

Graham Farish publish a very glossy A4 sized catalogue, (if you’re not familiar with European metric paper sizes, A4 is roughly equivalent to the North American standard of 8.5 x 11 inches, only slightly taller and narrower) lavishly illustrated with colour photos of all their products. It’s available through any UK mail order model railway shop, for around £3.50. It does not include any prices or spare parts lists, though it does show the various chassis available. (annoying word, isn’t it? Chassis. The plural may be the same as the singular, but it certainly looks wrong that way!)

I currently own just two Graham Farish locomotives - a BR green prairie tank steam engine and a GWR 53xx pannier tank. I’ve closely inspected a number of their other products in a local shop. So I can’t claim to be familiar with their entire product line. In particular I don’t know much about their diesel and electric engines. Have a look at C. F. Jones’ page for a little more info on Farish diesels. (installing a flywheel and a DCC decoder)

Farish sell quite a wide range of locomotives - some 30 or so steam outline models, some 40 or diesels and a half dozen electrics. All were built in the UK according to proprietary designs. Their products are very widely available - most UK model shops are likely to carry some of their merchandise. It’s easy enough to pick up the phone and buy something Farishy by mail order.

Unfortunately, the Farish products I’ve examined and tried out have been a fairly mixed bag. They definitely do not compare favourably with the quality levels that North American modellers currently enjoy when they buy Kato and Atlas engines. However, the engines aren’t as bad as, say, North American Bachmann or non-Minitrix Model Power products. They’re just... okay.

They’re also extremely expensive compared to the locomotive prices that North Americans are used to. No surprises there - not only are the Farish models built in Britain (higher labour costs) but the UK market is much smaller than the vast American one, so economies of scale don’t come into play to the same extent. (though they are generally cheaper than Minitrix locos)

The main problem I have is that all of the Farish steam engines that I’ve seen have bodies made of die-cast metal. This means that they’re fairly heavy, so traction and adhesion is good, but the detailing is rather poor. It isn’t possible to obtain the same kind of sharp, crisp detailing that’s achievable with injection-moulded plastic using die-cast metals. Accordingly there’s a sort of softness to the lines, edges and angles in all of the Farish products I’ve examined. There is one exception to this general rule - the new 53xx pannier tank engine has an injection-moulded cab with a diecast boiler. So it has much sharper detailing in the cab area. (note: Farish manufacture two pannier tanks - the 94xx type and the 53xx type. The former is an older model and doesn’t incorporate the improvements made with the 53xx model.) I’ve never bothered to look closely at the Farish diesels, since I’m not in the market for them, so I don’t know what their bodies are like.

The Farish products I’ve inspected are generally inconsistent in other ways. For example, my prairie tank is a nice enough model, with a partly open cab, yet the motor is positioned in such a way that the back of the internal motor frame sticks out in a very unrealistic fashion. And there’s a large capacitor soldered onto the back, in order to minimize television reception interference and thus comply with British RFI standards. So all you see when you look in through the cab windows is this huge beige-coloured capacitor. Several locomotives which, in the prototype, have open spaces between the frame and the boiler, have visible worm gears on the Farish model, like toys. I would have preferred these to be hidden somewhat. A lot of detailing is missing - no coupler hooks, vacuum pipes, running plate boiler stays, brake gear, etc. Handrails are all just unconvincing moulded-on bumps and not wires. The prairie tank body is noticeably higher up off the chassis than it should be, which gives it a rather top-heavy look. The turned metal buffer heads are not mounted parallel to the rail - they all stick up slightly.

The chassis they build are quite solid and sturdy, though not split-frame. They rely on the usual sprung contacts on the driving wheels. Connecting rods are rather oversized, though I suppose that’s to be expected given the general consumer audience for whom Farish seems to be aiming - thin rods would be very fragile and easily bent and broken. Flanges are also notably oversized - the classic pizza-cutters. On my prairie tank I have a problem with the pony truck wheel flanges bumping slightly on Peco code 55 track. I may turn these down, or I may buy new pony trucks. I’ve seen photos of newer Farish prairies and they have more realistically-sized pony wheels - the 10 year-old model I have has ridiculously undersized pony wheels. Hopefully the new replacements won’t be quite as massively flanged. I’ve also been told that there’s a person or company named Neil Ballantine that offers replacement finescale wheels for certain Farish models, though they are intended for 2 mm scale models, not British N. These wheelsets aren’t cheap, however, and would have to be regauged to the narrower British N standard - 2 mm scale runs on slightly wider track gauge - 9.42 mm.

The motors on their engines are not discrete components. In other words, they manufacture their own custom armatures, complete with worm gears, which slot into the chassis. The chassis itself therefore serves as both the motor casing and mounting for the permanent magnet, etc. All of their current products use 5-pole motor armatures, though I can’t say how smoothly they operate as my prairie tank uses an older 3-pole motor. I may replace the armature and see if performance improves. As it is right now, performance of that prairie tank is mediocre at low speeds, though this is partly attributable to the gear ratio of the worm gear. The loco doesn’t waddle and jerk like a piece of rubbish made by Model Power, say, but neither does it approach the silky smoothness of a Kato product. The newer 5-pole armatures are available from Farish for some 10 pounds or so, though the design requires a couple of replacement plastic armature housing pieces to accommodate the slightly larger commutator. To Farish’s credit, the firm will apparently send these replacement pieces to you for free if you need them - there’s a card that ships with new armatures that you send off to request the necessary components.

The painting and lining has been so-so in the past. My prairie tank has a sort of blodge on it rather than a recognizable British Railways logo, and the lining is a little erratic. However, I’ve got their newer GWR pannier tank (the last UK-designed model, I think), and the quality of the printing has definitely improved. So when shopping try to look for the newer Chinese-made product if you want better painting and printing.

For some utterly mysterious reason in the past Graham Farish insisted on installing their own Rapido variant couplers rather than using the traditional spring-centered design. And, unlike Peco’s Rapido variant ("Elsie"), the earlier Grafar couplers are awful; they just don’t work very well.

Farish coupler designs seem to come in three flavours, depending on when the model was built. The earliest design had couplers that more or less resembled the traditional Rapido shape, only the little narrow vertical post (used for uncoupler ramps) was considerably shorter than a true Rapido. But the worst part was that this type of coupler wasn’t equipped with a spring and instead had a U-shaped shank designed to exploit the inherent resiliency of the plastic to act springy. This is particularly hideous, as the poorly moulded coupler rarely rode level with (parallel to) the track - it usually stuck up at a wonky angle. These couplers also didn’t couple very easily.

The mid-period design looked even less like a Rapido coupler. It was longer and flatter than a standard Rapido, and so didn’t mate very well with couplers of any other design. Very frustrating. Fortunately it didn’t have the U-shaped shank but had instead a longer, loose-fitting shank housing which allowed the coupler to wiggle around and hinge upwards vertically somewhat. The only positive thing I can say about this design is that it made less of a visual impact than a traditional Rapido coupler, since it didn’t need a large boxy coupler pocket and it had a thinner shank. On this score this type fared better than the Peco "Elsie" couplers, which have a half-size coupler pocket.

Luckily, it appears that Graham Farish have since come to their senses and equipped most of their line with couplers that are generally Rapido-like in construction. However I mention this problem of their older couplers because there are a lot of old product sitting on shop shelves, and of course much second-hand stuff out there.

If you want a ready-to-run N passenger coach, then Graham Farish is your only option. They make a huge range of coaches - over 70 models - covering the post-grouping period of the Big Four through to the end of British Rail. All of their current coaches seem to be bogie coaches, though in the past they did sell a few four-wheel coaches. (their catalogue only shows four-wheel coaches in one place - fantasy models painted bright red and grey, and sold as part of a child’s train set called "The Gaffer.")

It should be noted that their models of Big Four coaches are not entirely accurate in appearance - all the lines they offer (GWR, LMS, LNER and SR) use the same plastic body moulding, even though each railway company had different coach designs in real life. The livery looks more or less right, so this may only be an issue for purists. I’m told that their BR coaches are considerably more accurate, though I’m not enough of an expert to judge.

The bogie coaches I’ve examined have been okay, but not outstanding. The printing varies from adequate to poor. Some - like the LNER teak-sided coaches, are quite bad. The teak pattern is a crude printing that would scale to six-inch wide woodgrain! The GWR paintwork is also a bit weak - the cream-coloured rectangular panels are usually not entirely square on the models I’ve examined. The wheels have nickel-silver tyres on black plastic centres - fairly standard stuff.

I have three four-wheel GWR coaches built by Farish in the early 1980s, and unfortunately they’re pretty disappointing. The body moulding isn’t bad at all for something originally made in the 1970s (the four wheel coaches are listed in the Grafar 1976 catalogue) - it has quite crisp lines and even details like the door hinges are visible. However the paintwork is pretty terrible. There are actually huge dust specks in the finish as if it was sprayed in a woodworking shop, the lining is wobbly and the crests aren’t recognizable. Most annoyingly, the roofs have chunks of flashing sticking out as though they were carved off with a pocketknife, and the delrin underframes are badly distorted. So distorted, in fact, that one of the coaches doesn’t roll freely at all, one wobbles as it moves and one doesn’t merely wobble but actually lurches back and forth as it rolls. This is not Peco quality here, sadly.

All of their goods wagons that I’ve seen or purchased have been fairly disappointing. They haven’t mastered the art of printing to the extent Peco has, that’s for certain. Large areas of printed colour are particularly patchy. I’ve simply repainted or heavily weathered most of my Farish wagons since the original paintwork was so poor.

The underframes are heavier than Peco’s, and again often feature the annoying couplers - which also means the wagons aren’t as closely coupled as their Peco counterparts. I’ve actually ended up replacing the underframes of my Farish wagons with Peco ones. The only problem here is that the Farish wagons are all about 2 mm longer than the Peco equivalents, which necessitates a lot of mucking around. I would only buy a Farish wagon if I wanted a particular design that Peco didn’t build, such as the GWR brake van. Additionally the Farish bodies are force-fitted to their underframes in such a fashion that it’s impossible to separate them without breaking off the plastic pins that hold them together.

Finally, Farish used to sell a line of building kits for use with their pre-packaged train sets. I can’t say much that’s favourable about them, however. For five pounds you get a solid lump of plastic and some printed stickers that you cut out and stick onto the block. The result is an overpriced toy that’s probably great if you want something for the kids to throw around the nursery or rec room (depending which side of the Atlantic you live on) but which is utterly unsuitable for a model anything. These are now discontinued.

Tips for Prairie Tank owners

Well, here are a few useful bits of information I’ve gleaned regarding this particular engine. I post them here in case anyone else finds them useful. Note that some of the comments here are applicable to many other steam outline models manufactured by Farish.

1. Do not loosen the middle screw!

   When you look at the engine from beneath you’ll see three screwheads. The two on the ends hold the model’s pony trucks in place and keep the flat plastic bottom plate attached to the metal chassis frame. The front (smokebox end) screw also holds the whole chassis to the body. However there’s a third screw, located close to the front of the frame. (the position may be reversed on some other Farish models)

   This is actually a bolt that has a nut on the end. And this nut holds down a wire that runs to the motor. If you loosen this bolt and the wire comes loose, you’ll suddenly have a loose connection and the engine won’t run smoothly. In fact, when this happened to me my engine was both running very erratically and arcing (sparking) at the wheels, actually pitting the rail surface! So don’t loosen it unless you’re dismantling the engine. If you do loosen it, you may have to remove the body from the chassis to tighten the nut. If the nut comes completely loose you may find it clinging to the permanent magnet.

2. Older models have horrible pony trucks.

   I have a model built in the early 1980s. The two pony trucks have vastly undersized wheels, as noted earlier in this document. They look so small that the whole model looks oddly wrong, even to the untrained eye. However, Farish is now shipping these engines with more reasonably sized wheels. You can order replacement pony trucks straight from the factory if you have a credit card - they’re about £1.50 apiece. Just phone them up and ask for replacement pony trucks for the prairie tank. Note that you can’t just buy the wheels - the entire truck must be replaced.

   This also yields you trucks equipped with the more Rapido-like coupler. The earlier prairie tanks have the horrible second-generation oversized Farish coupler. (which droops when coupled sometimes, preventing the pony wheels from rotating.)

3. Armatures.

   The older model I have has a 3-pole armature. However Farish now ships 5-pole armatures with all of its engines. Five poles are better than 3 because the motor’s slow-speed performance is smoother. You can replace your 3-pole armature with a 5-pole, but the commutator for the new armatures is larger than the old, so you also have to replace a couple other components, such as the plastic bracket that holds the armature into the metal frame. As noted earlier in this document, Farish will send you these parts for free. When you buy the armature, which is a Farish Type I armature (catalogue number 1129) you’ll supposedly get a coupon for the replacement pieces, and you’ll have to send that in.

4. Adjusting the piston cylinder casting.

   The plastic casting representing the piston cylinders can be awkward to line up. If it’s not aligned exactly the way the valve gear wants it to be then the coupling rods bind and the loco lurches forward, making a clicking noise with each lurch. So what I do is loosen the frontmost screw. Then I apply power to the loco and let the wheels turn while the cylinder casting is slightly loose. This pushes the casting into its happiest position. Once it’s there I simply tighten the front screw.

5. The capacitor.

   The hideous beige capacitor that’s very visible through the cab windows is there to absorb radio-frequency interference (RFI) generated by the motor, so that the model complies with British regulatory standards. However I’ve never seen a model engine shipped to the North American market with such a capacitor. (maybe they exist, but I’ve never seen one) So if you find the capacitor ugly you could consider removing it and not watch television while you run trains. The point is that the capacitor should not affect the engine’s performance in any way.

6. Collector pressure can be a problem.

   The locomotive relies on two sprung bits of metal that serve as current collectors. The problem is that if the collector on one side applies more pressure to the wheel than the collector on the opposite side, then the wheel will not be centred properly. My loco kept picking certain points - its leading pony truck kept trying to jump to the wrong place. When I looked at the loco from the front while I ran along the track I noticed that the pony truck wasn’t lined up properly with the actual engine itself.

   That all sprang from one of the front collectors putting too much pressure on the wheel. So I had to dismantle the damned thing, fiddle for ages with the collectors - bending them very, very gently - and reassembling it to see if it ran any better. The annoying thing, of course, is that the loco won’t run without the valve gear being properly installed inside the cylinder casting, and this is an insanely fiddly job. Sometimes I wish the engine had more realistically-scaled valve gear, but I appreciate the oversized nature of the model when I have to work on it, that’s for certain!

7. How to dismantle the engine.

   While I’m at it I may as well explain how to take the thing apart. As noted earlier, there are three screws visible from the underside of the engine. If you want to dismantle the whole thing remove the two screws at either end. When you do so the pony trucks will come off. Then, if you remove the middle bolt the entire plastic bottom plate will also come off. It has the current collectors riveted to it. If the bottom plate comes off then the wheels can all fall out, so be careful.

   If you’re just wanting to remove the body from the chassis you might try to avoid removing the bottom plate as getting the wheels back in can be a nuisance. Likewise the plastic piston casting - getting those damned plastic piston rod things into the piston casting is a fiddly and astoundingly frustrating job. If that’s the case just remove the frontmost (smokebox end) screw. The chassis then should be pulled forward - it’s got a metal tongue tucked in underneath a lip on the inside of the body casting.

   Be careful with the wheels. The axles and connecting rods, though vastly oversized, are still extremely fragile and can be bent if you apply too much pressure. Also, note that the coupling rods are riveted to the middle driver wheels, but not to the other two axles. However, the two other wheels are not the same. The ugly black plastic knobs that represent crank pins are shorter on the frontmost wheelset than the rearmost one. They’re shorter so that they don’t stick out and interfere with the smooth movement of the valve gear.

   Note that the brass clips alongside the armature are there to hold in the brushes. The brushes themselves are mounted inside on little springs - springs that are easily lost. Be careful!

8. Parts.

   Farish sell parts for all of the locomotives they currently ship - you should be able to ring up their factory and order whatever component you need. However they don’t have parts catalogues, nor do they sell exploded diagrams of their models or anything useful like that.

Summary.

If you want to build a model railway with ready-to-run locomotives and coaches, Farish is going to be one of only two choices - Dapol being the other. (Peco produced an engine in the 70s in conjunction with, I think, Rivarossi, and have a vaporous engine in the works) Unfortunately in the past its products seem to have been aimed more at the casual consumer than the discerning modeller, and this shows in the quality of its merchandise. That doesn’t mean that it’s all bad - just that sometimes it takes a little to work to bring it up to actual model calibre.

Usual disclaimer

Because we live in an absurdly litigious world, please note the following. First, I have no personal financial interest in any companies mentioned here, one way or the other. Second, all trademarked names are owned by their respective owners and are mentioned here purely for identification purposes. Third, no guarantees, express or implied, are made regarding the accuracy, fitness, whatever the hell about any of the information or opinion presented here. And finally, much of this is opinion of the author; nothing more.

Text copyright © 1997-2002 tela design.