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JohnMartin90125

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Everything posted by JohnMartin90125

  1. Which is what I'm doing. Droids is not a word that I would use to describe them. Customer Service Trolls is the only one I can put here without a number of ****. Anyone thinking that Hornby's handling of their Black Friday orders was appalling (which it clearly was) have had it easy when it came to dealing with the dishonesty of the trolls at Amercon.
  2. That 0-6-2T Thomas looks so wrong and so right at the same time. The not-J94 looks good as well, pity I sold my last locos ages ago with that 0-6-0 chassis, useful one that. Some of the many things on my workbench* include a (nameless) Connie/Polly/Nelly and the later one with the Margate telephone or telex number on it or whatever. Got some Polly nameplates (had a kitten arrive on Christmas Day 1977 that was named Polly so that's the name for one of the engines - and why not?) Only thing is with a necessary respray is that the original style nameplates won't look right, have to get some etched ones to suit the paintwork (any ideas of who does them would be welcome or am I thinking of replica paper lables?) As we are on the subject of stuff from the spares box... Current-style 0-4-0 chassis needs about a centimetre taking out for Connie & Co where the cylinders would have been, luckily the crude blanking insert used gives a more-or-less spot on cutting guide. There is too much overhang if cutting a notch out and as the body is already 'stretched', looks stupid so needs the chassis shortening, which I tried ages ago. However, if the front steps are broken off the body, a chassis with the cylinders makes an excellent alternative. The spring clip for the motor sits tight against the body and holds everything in place but something better needs to be fashioned. If using the original chassis, at least the later version with the Scalextric motor would make it a bit more DCC friendly than the X04 motor version. Another quick fix would be the gubbins from a "German" tank enging (R254/R256) which with square axles, means no wheel quartering but may need an extra pick up which isn't a difficult job. Won't be as an extreme reworking as others do, they have been in bits for a few years now. Frustrating at the moment when I want to do stuff and can't. Finally, the current-style 0-4-0 can go under a Dock Shunter body as well, a trim here and there. Seem to recall that they may have been an NBL shunter with a higher bonnet and connecting rods (Cadbury Bournville perhaps). Might be worth a try. *For workbench, read a cardboard box. Somewhere.
  3. GBL's customer "service" trolls also ignore e-mails and conventional letters so chargeback is one method of getting your money back from them, the other being a Direct Debit Idemnity. Like others and myself, you clearly have not received the level of service you have the reasonable right to expect. Anyone wanting help with this, I will draft a generic letter which can be used to claiming money back from your bank or card issuer under their legal and contractual requirements. PM me and will send a PDF of it, it can be printed on cardboard as it will be stiff! Deliberately poor customer service does seem to be a business model deployed by many companies these days. Employees refusing to put their full (or real) names is also a ploy to make things difficult when it comes to complaining about the vexation from these *******s and in legal proceedings. I have had enough of being lied to by Amercon customer services. They obviously enjoy offending people. These employees know what they are doing is wrong, so that makes them just as guilty as the company who employs them. My condition is bad enough without the rotten behaviour of these ******* ********. I am more than well aware of the amount of people with Autism, Asperger's Syndrome and so on who are keen on model railways, some of whom have subscribed to this series. The behaviour of GBL's utterly rotten customer "services" does not help those with said conditions. They take more than the enjoyment out of the hobby. It can be very upsetting.
  4. Unfortunately for those of us who have critised Hattons in the past on this forum, abuse can come quick and fast from trolls, hope you haven't had some of the nastyness I was subjected to. I'll never have anything to do with Hattons again, which I won't go into here. Haven't had a problem with Yodel, not used them much. Hermes have been fine whenever I used them for sending things but don't like stuff being left on the door step. I avoid Royal Mail as they are not only a rip off and unreliable but are partners with atos, so never use them for parcels and send faxes or e-mails instead of posting letters!
  5. I started an "Evil Thomas" some time ago, bought one cheap with the teeth stripped on the gear set, probably a result of a youngster forcing it like a push-a-long, looked fairly new. For the preparation, I sprayed some oven cleaner on it which took the number off a treat and left the red bufferbeams fully untouched. Can't remember if it was Mr Muscle or another one that the brand name escapes me but this has inspired me to have a go at finishing that (how many projects have we all started, eh?)
  6. Anyone know when the "suburban" coaches were withdrawn? I take it they were before the advent of blue...
  7. Thanks I thought it was pink then I saw the pic of the 56s in MLI (I think it was) and had the feeling the class 50s were green as well, too tired to go looking now. Eight more sleeps before Dr Who comes back. Is the emperor dalek nervous?
  8. Back to modelling, my Deltic is still in bits with only the underframe and bogies done and the body in white primer, the intention was to do it blue when I do the 9F but had a thought of doing it in workshop condition during the painting for something different. Anyone know what colour primer/undercoat BR used for their blue diesels? What colour pictures I have in things like Modern Locomotives Illustrated seem to have different colours used, white and grey not being amongst them. Just don't mention Porterbrook purple. 9016 looked rather silly in purple (I probably did as well in my goth days as well).
  9. Was slow at getting off the mark with that one I must admit. If I want to cancel a magazine subscription, I normally do that immediately before telling the magazine so that I know they can't take another penny. I did get another unhelpful reply tonight from the same expletive deleted as the last time with the same previous lies as before. I told the him to have a look at this forum to see how much rubbish they are sending out as the lying troll is claiming that only the odd one here and there has minor issues. Yeah, right. Whilst we, as modellers can be fussy, imagine what it would be like (and how much it would cost them) if we all sent everything back that had faults instead of what we are doing by, effectively, fixing them and buying loads more as well. One would have thought that a little dignity and respect would have been in order instead of the pathetic lies and excuses these somethingholes are coming out with. Still no reply as to the Evening Star as in my earlier pictures and still no reply as to the incorrect models received. What is it with magazines that think they can provide deliberately poor customer service and treat the customer like dirt when we effectively pay their wages?
  10. Thanks to The Weathering Man for an extremely good review of the Castle, both the prototypes and in model form. Let's hope at least one of the magazines offers him a paid job as a reviewer. It would be a refreshing change from some of the reviews that add as negative points as "nothing of note" as to avoid upsetting the companies who make the stuff. Many thanks to Corbs who has offered to send me a replacement for the missing valve gear as he is motorising his 9F. 1970s blue 9F will be started soon - maybe I could add weight to it with all the tomatoes we lost in the storm, neither of us like chutney so have dozens of green tomatoes to try and think of something to do with. Uries 15 sums up GBL's customer service rather well. It is probably a good job I can't use the telephone, my blood boils with incandescent rage at their e-mail responses so I'd be turning the air blue with them, probably even embarrass Roy "Chubby" Brown with what I would be coming out with! There are lies, damned lies and statistics customer services! I wonder if we should give an appropriate award for their standard of customer service? Am thinking of a used cat litter tray for them (sent to them without postage so they would have to pay extra to receive it, of course). Direct Debit Idemnities me thinks. Having told the plebs at GBL to cancel my subscription, they took no notice of this and have noticed another payment taken from our bank account on Monday. Since GBL customer service is so bad, I think that those of us who have complained to this company should send a summary of problems to our banks/building societies, highlighting the rotten behaviour of customer services and get their money back that way as there seems to be no way in hell that GBL customer services are going to treat us fairly, competently or with any degree of common decency. Then again, GBL are effectively bootleggers, pinching someone else's design work.
  11. Maybe Bloody 5, going by the track record (no pun intended) of GBL supplying incomplete, badly assembled models and inept customer service to subscribers. Or could say to people it is a Black 5 but I should get a load of shares in Specsavers first to make a few bob. Being Irish, I am naturally pale blue especially when I was unloading wagons in the snow so it isn't a technical term
  12. My GBL Jinty wasn't a good example and along with the missing bufferbeam (a bit of red paint on the front so was it dropped or something before packaging it?) and some odd marks on the body. Plastic flow lines was my first guess but the pattern dosen't seem right to me.
  13. Just looked at it, thanks for the link. Aim to do one but would have to be a straight repaint (with copius amount of artistic licence or when we were doing photography at college, bulls***ing!) BR maroon Stanier 5MT is on the cards as well (can't really call it a Black 5, can't call it a Red 5 as they were Jubilees) so suggestions what to call it would be welcome - other than a Brown 5 as that would be rather naughty.
  14. Wonderful stuff. I sent a few suggestions to that Ficticious Liveries site some years ago and a quite a few were done, such as the Merseyrail 73s in Silver. I also suggested a 9F in blue but didn't like what I saw, large logo. Might not be able to do these fab cut and shuts like you have but it is enjoyable seeing something different as opposed to accurate down to the last rivet. Some fun.
  15. I know I'm not alone in receiving rubbish from this magazine - you should have seen some of the rubbish in my local Asda (I don't mean the Chosen By You range, either although said range of "food" would problably have the same degree of taste as a lump of badly painted plastic). If you can imagine an ice cream man with a bottle of raspberry sauce in one hand and a cornet in the other. hang on a minute, have I worked out who is actually making these models? No joke, the splatters on some GBL stuff I saw looks like the bufferbeams had paint just thrown at them without masking and so thick and heavy, would have been impossible to work with. Maybe what I thought was globs of glue over my Jinty's boiler was actually chopped nuts? I'm just gutted I didn't get a flake stuck in mine or some hundreds and thousands! One safety valve aside, I have two 9Fs that scrubbed up rather well (apart from the two photographed earlier by yours truly). I need to redo the smokebox door for the 28xx and weather it but at the end of the day, whilst we are choosing to detail, redecorate and convert, there isn't any excuse for a lot of the crap that we have been sent and I do wonder if subscribers are being sent some of the worst items in the hope that it would be too much effort to return them? Still no response from their customer service as to why I received another 28xx and another Black 5 instead of two 9Fs. I think for most people, one GBL 28xx is more than enough!
  16. Thanks, Jason. I'm not expecting perfection from these GBL things, I mean, virtually every model has had a chipped or missing buffer which seemed to be petty so didn't bother telling them, bent cab handrails,missing screws - you know the sort of thing. Here's the original Evening Star they sent a couple of months ago (sorry about the blured picture but you'll get the point). The smoke deflector was glued in like that so with my limited abilities, it had to go back to them as I couldn't budge it without the risk of damage, plenty of superglue I presume for the discolouration to happen, buckled wheels as well. Found the pictures on the SD card in amongst pictures of my wife's cakes, which made me feel pretty hungry! First through the unopened package, frosting on the tender frame... Close up after taking out the package... [EDIT: blurred eyesight, it was taken THROUGH the package of course and yes, I did a preview before posting - doh!] On the tender underside, we see a load of what looks like superglue and a buckled wheel/axle. Keeper plate wasn't fully secured either even though there was a ton of glue on it! A not very well fitted smoke deflector (sorry about the blurred image). At least the one from the newsagent behind it wasn't too bad, the bit of black paint on the wheels and valve gear alone done wonders for the model, if they done that instead of all the silver, most of the models would have looked a damned sight better. One day, I'll get something that isn't crap!!!! At least I cancelled my subscription to them. Today's was the last straw. Maybe I'm paranoid but after cancelling it after all the rubbish models (end even worse customer service) I can't help thinking that they deliberately sent me this bad example of a Castle (and were too mean to send an N Scale dust magnet!
  17. I was also unexpectedly woken this morning by the arrival of a Castle (and a Jinty). I'm not doing a full on review of the Castle but expecting disapointment I was, did not expect what I receieved. They say that a picture paints a thousand words, just three are required: for f***'s sake. Here's an overall shot with some self-explanatory detail shots. No "free" unwanted dust magnets N guage model as promised, presumably that has gone the same way as customer service has... Saving the "best" to last...
  18. Many thanks for taking the effort to do this for us. Non of us are expecting perfection at these prices but many of the issues aren't even about the models! These days, saying [whoever] is sorry is just another way of telling someone to Foxtrot Oscar. I'll drop you a line shortly as I need to work out how many number transfers I will use of each in case I have to make do with what is left. A previous project saw a number of 4's and 7's being used and am about to use some more, got sidetracked as I found my previously mislaid Black 5s that I started - a quick one, did 44781 receive economy black and the yellow cabside stripe? I know what you mean about colour perception. When I was a kid, when travelling to Liverpool on the train, we had to get off at James Street when they were doing the Loop Line, the buses were mostly dark green "over there". Preserved examples look much, much lighter in the same way there is a massive difference between the darker green used under Maunsell than the lighter one used by Bullied. One of the reasons mentioned was that buildings back in the early/mid 70s were filthy and made everything look dark, before everything was sandblasted which reflected more light around everything. Years spent printing colour photographs made me even more aware of colour perception. Should the cab on the Midland Railway compound be a different shade to the body? Hornby's 1980s rendition had it as a vastly different shade whereas Bachmann's had it the same shade as the body. As Hornby didn't produce the MR Compound with a choice of numbers on a seperate sheet, which one got it right I wonder?
  19. I am dealing with them by e-mail. At first they seemed on the ball and as you say, pretty quick however I think they must have reduced the amount of staff allocated to deal with GBL matters, from what I gather, many bit parts have a sudden drop in custom after the first few issues and so to reduce costs, they probably did away with staff. It's not as if I can pick up a telephone anymore and sort it out that way. Unfortunately, deliberately poor customer service is a business model these days. The company my wife works for provides customer service for insurance/assurance companies. Their company has picked up many contracts due to the dissatisfaction with the customer service previously provided by Capita (aka 'Crapita' in certain parts of the media) so when it was annouced that Capita picked up some of atos work, the dread, fear and loathing of that company truely made me sick. You seem to have been pretty fortunate with your dealings with them - which I hope comes as a great relief as it has been commented on by others that the customer service is not to to expectations one would reasonably expect. One does not expect rudeness and 'replies' regarding a merger/takeover of an insurance business when dealing with an issue surrounding a toy train! Kinda feel sorry for the people involved in the insurance companies involved if the same dim-witted individual is dealing with something probably considerably more complex than "I haven't received my parcel yet" or "my parcel is damaged/faulty item supplied". Then again, the dim-witted one probably stuggles with replies as it must be hard to type an e-mail when said individual probably thinks that shoes go on one's hands and not on one's feet...
  20. Patient confidentiality is only used when it suits them or to evade dealing with complaints of malpractice. After objecting to a student being present at a private consultation (after telling them in advance that no students should be present or allowed near my medical records, I was abused by a vile, indian doctor. I am sick of the NHS. Anyway, back to GBL stuff (but something that sickened me all the same)... As we have seen, customer service from the magazine company is utter crap. I ordered two 9Fs from them, one was sent which my wife collected this morning. Cylinders and valve gear missing as will be seen from the picture (the model above is also a GBL one which I repainted the wheels and valve gear, otherwise unaltered. Let's see what these useless trolls at customer service do about this..
  21. Be nice to see the wagon from post #123 released (00 please!) but not by Dapol as they all look the same with their somewhat generic printing, leave it to Hornby or Bachmann!
  22. MR 'broke' Hornby's Christmas embargo a few years back which did spoil the (then) Christmas fun although it could have been due to the chaotic Christmas post, think the mags were sent out earlier than usual to subscribers. Don't know if this happened with other mags as I only subscribed to the one mag at the time. Was thinking of giving a clue that it may come in a box but you didn't hear that from me.
  23. It's when customer services lie about something that really get's my back up, that and preformatted text replies which have little, if anything, to do with what was enquired about in the first place. Is this why they don't put full (or real) names on enquires, to make it hard to complain about? I had to insist that one of the magazine customer service people have no involvement as she was so bad at her job, sending me details of someone else's enquires about insurance mergers. One just waffled on without addressing the issue and can't even spell his name properly Q: How hard is it to reply to "I haven't received my parcel yet. When am I likely to receive it?" My wife was considering a subscription to the same company's Great Bakes" but changed her mind after seeing the utter crap that flowed from customer services and the irregular and very late delivery of GBL. Back to normality although I do like looking at these silly little emoticon things! Will we see a Lima King or Hornby 1978 version without the boiler being undercut? Never seen a Lima King in the flesh, so to speak. Margate HST and Western (easier to come by than Lima perhaps), 80s Princess is my reckoning. Have a Hornby Western from Childhood days that I rebuilt from bits. Don't want another one, it was not one of Margate's finest diesels although the Class 25 was rather good and looks more like one than Bachmann's, not refereing to the finer detail and printing but Hornby capture the look better. With a few brands having a go at it over the years and only recently Dapol seem to have got it right (must be made by someone else then!!!) A big steaming pile of Deltic quality then. As I mentioned earlier, the Castle just doesn't look right at all, obviously not expecting perfection. It's just a pity the way things panned out that Jinty wasn't my final subscription model. Maybe I'll look to Barry for inspiration.
  24. May even pretend that when the 71s were withdrawn they were sent up north like the 73/0s were and pressed into departmental service (well, I'll run what I like!) As two blue FYE versions are listed, is one going to be weathered or is this planned for later on?
  25. It was the ex-works picture I saw, may be the same one you mentioned. With the Dapol one being yellow with blue lettering, did whoever get the colours for body and print mixed up? Wouldn't surprise me.
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