Ill go into my local shop tomorrow and see about failsafes there.
There are a few transmitters on ebay new with receiver 2 crystals and battery packs for the car and transmitter for £60 the lot. Seems quite a good deal.
If your gonna start from scratch please get 40mhz, 27mhz quite frankly is rubbish, to be honest you should be getting 2.4ghz but it might be out of your price range.