City of Truro- flawed beauty?

This beautiful photo from Chris P's photostream on Flickr...here

There is no doubt that the new NRM release of City of Truro is a spectacularly lovely model. I couldn't hand build one as good as that, and certainly not to that price.  So it's rather tragic that the two stunning examples of the Bachmann model that I have seen didn't actually work. I'm sure that most of the locos sold by the NRM work well, after all, there's a proud "Q.A." sticker on the box, isn't there?

My father-in-law purchased one from the NRM recently. After we had stood around in amazement, gazing at the wondrous thing, he put it on the layout, expecting the loco to move silkily away. Sadly,  it stuttered ominously, buzzed and suddenly moved off, only to stop a few centimetres later. I should say that Bill has a sizeable stud of Bachmann locos that all run beautifully, so it's not his controller, or his track. After a couple of hours of running in on the rolling road, things were worse. So he contacted the NRM, who were very apologetic, offering him a full refund. However, Bill is 81, and is a little impatient, so he immediately ordered another one. He couldn't wait while the first one was returned and refunded. 

The NRM did indeed send another immediately- top service. But this one was even worse, running in a series of scary lunges and refusing to work well enough even to "run in". So, the old boy has given up any thought of having the City of Truro, and has decided to wait for the promised "Castle" to be released. I just hope that runs properly...and that he lives long enough to see it.

But, back to the "City".  I am sure there must be examples of this superb  model out there that run well, I guess Bill has been unlucky. The NRM have been fine, doing all that could be asked of them. But what about that "Q.A." sticker? It's less than worthless.