Questions about plastic rail from a newbie

Hello, I'm from England too, but not close at sheffield, if you want faceless trains you can buy new ones from Japan they are the plarail range and I find them to have the best drive units quiet, strong and sometimes quick, here are a few examples

C61 - http://pages.ebay.com/link/?nav=item.vie...584468535
C56 - http://pages.ebay.com/link/?nav=item.vie...762083941 (one of my favourite)
C57- http://pages.ebay.com/link/?nav=item.vie...584468535 (this one is tender driven)
D51-http://pages.ebay.com/link/?nav=item.vie...585429606
C12- thee don't appear to be any on eBay at the moment

The only problem with these is that they are all Japanese trains, most of trains sold in the UK are trackmaster and are mostly thomas characters, which ones do you want to deface? They are all relatively easy to do with a Stanley knife, a lot of the thomas characters are black around the smokebox door so some humbrol black enamel covers it, When I've defaced engines before I usually measure the old face then buy a 00 gauge hornby smoke box door that best matches the size, cut the fixings flush then glue it on. The advantage to converting Trackmaster thomas characters is that you get UK engines to run on your train set, I've defaced salty, Gorden, James and Neville so far I fancy doing a Spencer but don't want to spend the money on it!!!

Here's a video of some of my sons trains running,



Hope it's some food for thought,