i would be grateful for a brief rough rating of rolling stock, i've inherited Graham farish, lima and peco, they all seem ok to me, maybe the lima are a bit on the light side. i nothing of dapol or kato which i understand is the leader.

Very brief summary, you'll come across more discussions of each manufacturer through the forums though


Lima: Old Italian manufacturer. Their N gauge stock is very old now (I think they stopped N gauge in the 80s?). Locos tend to be out of scale in either direction and have awful motors that are usually non-working now. Coaching stock tends to be a little underscore (although it has a good variety) and the trucks tend to be a little on the high side as the under frames are a bit big.

Graham Farish: This broadly splits into 2 eras. There's the "Poole" made GF stuff, which is made in the UK prior to Bachmann taking over the company. Generally speaking, the motors and gearing are more primitive, the wheels have bigger flanges ("pizza cutter") and they're lower detail. Other than some split gear issues and general wear from age though, they can still be fairly reliable.

If you have any of the GF 4 wheel coaches, these aren't exactly known for being accurate, detailed or even particularly good. However they can get insane prices on eBay

The 2nd Graham Farish era is after Bachmann purchased the company and mostly were made in China with a short bit of crossover initially. The later they are, the more detailed they became as older versions were replaced with better motors and more detail. Locos can suffer from split gears still though. Current day Farish rolling stock is rather good, if not quite as reliable as Kato/Fleischmann etc.

Peco: Mostly known for wagons, Peco also made 2 locomotives. The older one (20+ years now) is the 4-6-0 Jubilee and later the 0-6-0 Collet (10+ years ago now?) which even had DCC built in. Both were really detailed models for their time and the Collet is probably still regarded as an excellent RTR model nowadays. (the Jubilee also has a lot of fans).

Not sure there's much more to be said as Zwilnik has pretty much covered everything you asked in his comprehensive reply.
Lima stuff is out of gauge for British outline as it is 1/160 rather than 1/148 and the coaching stock is not particularly accurate colour wise and has not got flush windows so the glazing tends to be set back in   to the coach body and looks daft.

Quote from: newportnobby on February 29, 2016, 08:30:59 PM
Lima stuff is out of gauge for British outline as it is 1/160 rather than 1/148 and the coaching stock is not particularly accurate colour wise and has not got flush windows so the glazing tends to be set back in   to the coach body and looks daft.

It's not even a uniform 1:160, pretty much all over the place. In contrast to what Zwilnik says, the motors do seem pretty robust, but are certainly very primitive and usually with pickups on one set of bogies only (which makes for three speed settings: stop, flat-out and stall).

Kato is one of the two main Japanese manufacturers, and apart from Japanese trains do quite a lot of North American and continental stuff. Alas nothing specifically British, the closest they make are the EuroStar and continental versions of the class 66, both at 1:160. All their trains are manufactured in Japan and are of excellent quality and reliability. However DCC support is limited.