Just purchased class 52 special from cheltenham models arrived weathered and sound fitted but was a poor runner spoke to cheltenham models and was sent back it turns out both gear trains are bent. This is one of five locks i have purchased in the last two years that have been useless. So no longer buying Dapol products. Cheltenham models have been great and doing best to get new gears

At Tings 2 years ago I went to buy a class 66 large logo Br blue ,made by Dapol for a GaugeMaster special, They both had the same problem , hesitation . I persisted with them on my layout, but to no avail.
Today from my local model shop I bought the GF version - how well does it look and run!, - Fantastic.

Tony.. 

Are the Westerns available factory sound fitted? I didn't think so, in which case isn't it second hand, and therefore a bit unfair?

My Special Edition D1015 in Golden Ochre was supplied by CMC ready fitted using an ESU LokSound Next18 Micro v5.0 decoder. I thought all sound-fitted locos were now being supplied direct by Chirk.

The weathering of this loco was undertaken by James of CMC, and is quite different to the standard finish produced by the Dapol factory, and indeed compared with the one from Osborn's.

Interesting. Yes they must be fitting them then. Ignore my previous comment!

I guess everyone's mileage varies - I've got three Dapol 52's and they all run extremely smoothly even at a crawl. I got one from John Gymer at YooChoos, sound fitted, so I guess if there was a problem I'm sure he would have taken care of it before selling it on to me, but the others are out-of-the-box great runners.

I guess I'm saying consistency and quality control are the problem, not an underlying design issue.

A little while ago I bought as second hand a mint unrun desert sand 52 from Osborn's original release. It had only ever sat in a display case but when tested turned out to have a broken gear and broken bogie tower clip. The alternative bogie was fine, and fortunately DCC Supplies had complete spare bogies available.

Do Dapol supply the 52 sound fitted ? I didn't think they did, I thought they only supplied the class 50 & 68 fitted with sound.

If that assumption is correct then someone else must have fitted sound and speaker, it might have been them rather than Dapol who did the damage to the gears.

NGM

Great question! If only someone asked that 5 posts ago

Fitting sound into the Class 52 requires disassembling the chassis and cutting bits of it away (link), so that could well be the cause of running problems. But I doubt that a DCC professional would return it in that state. 

https://www.youchoos.co.uk/Index-Resource.php?L1=Guides&Item=NDapol52

As I said, I bought a CL52 from John. Perfect running. I'm embarrassed to say that I thought it was the cause of my layout shorting out and sent it on a 12,000 mile round trip to Steeple Ashton to get it checked out. It turned out it was my DCC setup that was bad, not the loco. Hence embarrassed.

It should be noted that the newest westerns are Next 18, so are closer to plug and play sound. You'll still need to make space for the speaker though, but I presume that's what CMC are doing. If they're offering a "sound fitted" option they're obliged to sort it.

Here's the link for the sound-fitted version:
https://www.cheltenhammodelcentre.com/locomotives/dapol-n-gauge-class-52-western-d1015-western-champion-golden-ochre-small-yellow-panels-dcc-sound-fitted/p-d1015ds