"John Turner" wrote
are some fairly stiff
No kidding. A friend of mine who is a serious trans-Europe basher, has showed me his slides of the recent TGV works under construction, and the swoopiness is indeed terrific. In the old days they'd sooner do curves than gradients; nowadays with speed the priority and electric power on tap they'd sooner do gradients than curves. Come to that, a GNER electric probably goes faster up Stoke Bank faster than Mallard came down it, and certainly beats a Deltic in either direction.
A pity model motors don't behave like their prototype equivalents. Much of model behaviour is attributable to the poor torque transmission across worm gears: if someone were to invent a motor the size and shape of a pound coin that does what an Escap 1219 does only at a fifth of the rotational speed so it could be attached solely to spur gears, and ideally withstand brief high stall current, we'd not worry about half the things we do. Except that moany British manufacturers would still find price-based excuses not to use it...
Tony Clarke