47702 County of Suffolk

My late grandmother was born in Suffolk and there were several locos which contained the name Suffolk in their titles. A B17 was named The Suffolk Regiment, Anglia Railways' 86234 was named Suffolk - Relax, Refresh, Return between 2002-05. County of Suffolk has been carried by two class 47s, 47180 in 1979 (47584 from 1981), removed in 1993 and transferred to 47702 in early 1994.

I opted to model County of Suffolk as presented in its final form in Virgin livery between 1998-2000 because I had a small nucleus of locos and stock covering the early privatisation era and that Virgin Cross Country's train formations could be more easily accommodated in the room I have available to hand.

The model is a Lima/Hornby hybrid, the body being an unmodified Lima, albeit I applied a permanent marker pen to represent the push-pull jumper cables at each end, which Lima omitted, combined with a Hornby chassis from an ex-Blue Pullman 47 which has been DCC fitted with my trusted Bachmann 36-553 chip.

Looking at images on www.class47.co.uk I'm aware that it had the modified cabs for the period I'm interested in modelling this loco so the Lima body should be amended, also I haven't as yet procured etched plates to overlay the Lima printings. These will be future jobs to do as part of a total package including separate jumper cables.