BRAWA - Voith Gravita 10 BB, DB BR 261 Review

The latest Brawa Voith Gravita 10BB arrived from The Hobby Store in Faversham

www.hobb-e-mail.com/‎ late last week, and I managed to spend a few hours at the weekend getting to know it better... 

I managed to get hold of the DB Traffic red livery as 261 061-6, which sold out almost instantly on all the German model railway shop websites. Which goes to show sometimes there are advantages modelling a minority interest subject area in the UK, as even though both DB livery models are sold out at Brawa and in Europe, a small specialist shop in Kent had two...

First thoughts on removing from the well packed box (similar to the latest Bachmann boxes and far better than Roco's impossible to access polystyrene efforts), is that this is a beautifully detailed model, albeit I imagine rather fragile due to the plethora of tiny parts. To confirm my suspicion, there were two of the cab roof mounted radio masts missing. On a close inspection of the area where I unpacked to loco, one was located in the box, whilst for the other I've fabricated a replacement using various thicknesses of plasticard which is undetectable. One of the bonnet catches was also missing, and again I fabricated a replacement. The walkway handrails and side walkway guards are glued into the metal chassis with very short pegs, and one was partly lose, this was  refitted using a tiny amount of CA on a scalpel blade.

Now, onto the difficult part, actually getting in to the b*gger.

Now, I have previous with Brawa models, as I have a number of both their N and HO models and some are easier to access to fit decoders than others. Most notably I destroyed a BR 203 trying to fit a decoder on N...

The N-gauge Brawa Gravita was actually a doddle, being that the metal chassis was screwed to the bodyshell, but not the HO, no, that would be too obvious. Instead a series of fiddly clips which you cannot see, and are scared to force allow both bonnets to be slid off. Now this must also be done whilst avoiding shearing off the bonnet handrails and walkways, cab roof details or buffer beam parts. easier said than done.

Once slid forwards the bonnets pull upwards and off. Once this has been achieved, it does seem to be a little easier now they've both been on and off a few times. The decoder is a 21 pin drop in which is easy once you've actually got to it.

As I only had an el-cheapo Bachmann decoder to hand, this was used to test the loco, and before tweaking the CVs it is a little jerky at start up, but I'm going to fit my preferred decoder, ESU lok-pilot later. 

Fitted Lighting

My good god it's bright. Five LEDs heads at each end four on the buffer beam handrails and one on the cab nose they are like mini floodlights. The tails are similarly bright. Unfortunately in taking the bonnets on and off I managed to dislodge  one of the bonnet lights but on closer inspection it had simply been misaligned with the bonnet lens. The Gravita is also fitted with an independent cab light (Fn 2) and detailed cab interior which is nice.

All in all, this is a new model that looks great, runs well and is very detailed (which is a bit of a double edged sword). My personal advice would be to suggest only buying this model in the flesh to ensure the tiny weeny easily knock-off-able bits are all present and correct. In summary  9/10, (loses a mark for being a pain to get into...)