Quantum.

I bought this Piko "Hobby" BR218 from Scograil at the London Festival of Railway Modelling, Alexandra Palace, last Saturday. In order to change the couplings to my preferred Profis, it's necessary to remove the swinging coupler mounts from the bogies. These have a small spring to centre the coupling...and, naturally, when I removed the first mount, the spring, which is held captive between the mount and a hole in the front of the bogie, vanished. Normally when a spring pops out, I have a vague which direction it's gone in, but not this time! A search of the modelling table, followed by a search of the floor, eventually yielded a spring. But not the one that had gone missing...that's silver in colour, the one I found is bronze. So the original spring slipped off to some other dimension, then back again, changing colour in the process. Quantum, obviously 🙄 

Meanwhile, back in our reality...what a bargain! Sure, it doesn't appear to have flywheel drive, but it shows no sign of stalling or hesitation on Schinkendorf's dead frog points, the body is not as sophisticated as the more expensive "Expert" version, but has excellent paint and kmarkings, and it has sprung coupling mounts rather than kinetic, but these work fine on Schinkendorf's Setrack curves and points. 

So, how much of a bargain? With 10% show discount, my loco cost just under £60, the Roco version, which is what Scograil have in stock at the moment, is listed at £182.75 (so would be about £164 if discounted), that's nearly 3 times the price. Now, if I wanted to add detail, I could get the Hobby loco to look nearly as good as the Expert, have a lot of fun in the process, and still spend nowhere near as much. With a lot of people going on about how expensive the hobby is nowadays, especially for beginners, this sort of loco is A Good Thing. 

Oh, and the spring? Works fine...