Andy Hayter

While I agree that setting up VAT registered entities in the EU is expensive and storing goods for customers requires a lot of warehouse space and therefore I would not recommend Rails to go down either route, your comment about overseas customers paying the true costs show a lack of appreciation of the issues however. On the costs side Overseas customers have always paid p&p "at cost". Now ask yourself why, if a seller says free delivery to the UK, UK postage and packaging costs are not deducted from the overseas costs. They never are. So that regarding costs but it does not stop there. Some administrations and delivery systems (and I understand that Ireland and Spain are among the worst) make life very difficult and sometimes impossible through bureaucracy and inefficiency. If you look through the buying and sell from / to the EU thread you will find many examples of things going badly or completely wrong. Some administrations seem to have streamlined systems and Australia seems to be a good place to receive your orders. Yes we don't pay UK VAT but we in the EU are required to pay local VAT and the process of doing that means that we have to pay additional administration charges. These can be quite reasonable. They can sometimes be quite horrendous. A £10.50 purchase however has just cost me €35 - so 3 times the purchase price. I have also "enjoyed" poor administration of VAT collection. I received a package (it happened to be from Rails but no criticism of them) where the VAT seemed to be rather higher than I expected and the administration costs were also much higher than I would pay though the local post office. It turned out that the commercial invoice had the costs declared in Euros and the import agent had converted this to euros by applying the pound to euro exchange rate so inflating the purchase cost. I have complained to the agent but received no reply. Even had they admitted the error and recompensed, the time and trouble really is a PITA. Administration costs can be €3 (La Poste online) so why do UPS, DPD, DHL etc; charge many times that.

Yes I was going to make the point that large swathes of France are like the remoter parts of Northern England or much of Scotland. We are very lucky that local postal facilities remain in what would be totally uneconomic places in the UK. This is thanks to local subventions to keep such establishments going and is one reason why our taxes are a bit higher here. I have no objection.

France is a much bigger country than the UK and consequently an alternative to La Poste may well be many kilometres away, whereas even small villages tend to have a post office counter. My own village of 300 souls has a poste office but I have a round trip of 22km to deliver to a UPS drop off point. So that is €3,50 or so petrol cost to counteract any savings in the actual postage cost.

Two thoughts Is the sale through Ebay's Global Shipping Plan? They just fleeced me about the same for delivering 3 sets of 3D printed 00 chimney pots from the UK to France. La Poste encourage people to use one of their standard sized boxes (goes down the sorting lines easily) and often give the impression that there is no option. These are sold at a very nice premium for nice La Poste that is. Guessing at the weight however, this looks like standard package postage: Poids jusqu’à…Tarifs Colissimo Vers zone OM 1 (overseas postage rates) from La Poste's website 500 g 12,65 1 kg 20,00 2 kg 27,25

I don't want to stray from Dymented but to answer the questions: Haltemprice is a real area on the north bank of the Humber just west of Hull*. So no it's not GWR. The station is a tad over 1/2 metre long and the layout around 5.5 m including the fiddle yard. Windows are actually already in place but don't show - Scale Model Scenery and are probably closer to scale thickness. I did say my photo skills lacked a lot! The station is based on but is certainly not a copy of the GNR station at Bardney*** on the original GNR route to the north from Kings X to Doncaster - now called the loop line. * Perhaps better known because it was also the centre of a comedy - The New Statesman - featuring Tory MP Alan B'Stard played by Rik Mayall. Reading the fictitious obituary**, some items seem to have predicted the behaviour of a former PM. ** https://www.comedy.co.uk/tv/the_new_statesman/features/alan_bstard_obituary/ *** http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/b/bardney/ Further questions will hopefully be answered when my virtual pen gets around to finishing a thread in the Pre-grouping railways section.

I teased last week about my in the house project. It is taking a lot longer than I expected to firstly write my own thread and secondly finish the model, which is a station building for my Haltemprice Quay layout. So to stop the tease, here are rough shots (photography is not my forte as demonstrated by the lean on both pictures) of the work in progress. Roofing, facias and soffits, rain water goods, chimney pots etc still to do.

But it can be just as easy to make fundamental mistakes in scenic modelling. Perhaps these go unnoticed because while some of us a true experts in the railway, I suspect few of us would claim to be experts in the wider world. This can result in an almost anything goes view of what happens beyond the railway fence. Examples of the above would be: vehicles out of period too many vehicles in periods when motorised transport was much rarer wrong sort of farm animals - no a cow is not just a cow for example and cows were bred and raised for particular regions. out of period advertising wrong sort of road signs or road markings

@southern42 Where has the sun gone? looks like it came here, which is just as well given that yesterdays torrential rain turned to thunder and snow overnight. There is a fair bit of melting to do.

Sadly not illegal @jamie92208. French customs site clearly states that VAT is applicable from the first euro for all imports from outside the EU. The old rules of thirty something euros being exempt was rescinded by the EU a couple of years ago. You are right though that it makes buying small low value items hellishly expensive. One thing that can help is if you ask the seller to include your email address in the commercial invoice. This usually results in an email from La Poste's import department demanding the VAT but with a reduced fee to La Poste.

Selective quoting missed off the "kits are as rare as rocking horse poo". I and many others would wish that David's range would reappear. Until then keep your rarities safe.

But I would hazard a guess that one of the words they said started with the "f" and have a "k" in it.

I agree Stephen I was more focused on the overall availability where the Midland at least gets a showing courtesy of Slaters.

Really? AFAIAA no LYR wagons rtr and kits as rare as rocking horse poo if you exclude brake vans GNR - yes we will get a loco coal wagon to RCH standards but most of their wagons of the period were on 9'6" wheelbase chassis. We actually have more GER wagons - nothing wrong with that of course. H&BR? GCR - a few kits and Bachmann's 3 wagon club set where one is LNER and another CLC. . There are many holes even allowing for the promised but not yet delivered wagons.

Someone mentioned dark and gloomy a few pages back. Same here. It has been persisting down all day and to add to the gloom we had a 3 hour power cut probably due to the high winds causing HT cables to touch and short out the grid.

Yes but without quite sophisticated analytical equipment and samples of all the thinners there is nothing to be done.

There is probably minimal difference, except that the medical grade will have had to have had substantial medical testing; statistical analysis of the side effects (there are always side effects) and will have to be covered by huge levels of insurance- especially if sold into North America where any perceived defect is likely to cost millions.

Pleased to say that our snow is disappearing almost as quickly as it came. About half disappeared yesterday - and has filled all of the empty water butts that were set out just before the snow came. The rest is now melting fast.

Snow today. From nothing this morning; I have just ventured out for the first time today to do the nightly rounds of emptying cat litter trays and filling food dishes and the drifts in places are crutch deep.

Ah but I have an ongoing project* in the house. Winter does tend to make the modelling room a tad cold so I have management authorisation to bring small projects into the house. * More of that elsewhere later when a bit more progress has been made.

15 Degrees you say! Here it has snowed from around 08:00 onwards. 20 - 30 cm now with, in places, quite a lot of drifting. I am not even thinking of venturing out to cross to the grange and model floor.

I agree but if you build layouts for public exhibition then outside approval is also required, so it is a bit more complex than your one liner.

I despair of the "People who only xxx are not proper modellers" arguments. The problem is that those who shout such negative (against others) comments do not realise that there is a whole spectrum of modelling and I am almost certain that they are not at the pinnacle of the I am much better/purer than you mountain. To illustrate You are not a proper modeller because: You only run rtr out of the box. You only make minimal changes to rtr items - number and name changes. You don't build kits. You don't scratch build anything; You run on non-scale track. You are using EM and not P4 (other scale combinations are available in almost all scales). You have not modelled a real location. You have truncated your real location. You have not done your proper research. That loco could never have pulled that piece of stock. (Oh actually I don't have a layout but I do know what is right and wrong.) So where do you sit on that spectrum? Me? 00 gauge. Have kit and scratch built stock but am not afraid to use rtr. Happily scratch building infrastructure but at the same time will buy in components such as window, doors, textured sheets etc..

Ah yes. To misquote Kilgore, "I love the smell of Molybdenum Sulphide in the morning."

As a pre-war GCR modeller the only reference I can find for GCR dark wagon grey is on the Precision paints web site. As shown above it is much lighter and some sources indeed suggest LMS wagon grey as good match, so your suggestion is a good one. With very limited access to Precision paints, I use Tamiya XF-66 light grey.

But see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohs_scale