Jeremy

I agree there is a market for ready-to-run, but what we don't want is ready-to run that has inherent faults, we want ready-to-run that is accurate and reliable. Otherwise we might as well just go coarse scale and purchase Bassett-Loake or ACE Trains. What really concerns me is the fact that Dapol think the O gauge market is more forgiving of errors than the OO one - it isn't, and if anything, the opposite is the case. The O gauge milk tanker is (arguably) LESS accurate than their OO one, and if anyone from Dapol is reading this, I have to say that really isn't on guys. Some parts like brake levers and tank strapping are definite improvements, but axlebox detail seems to have got worse, And as Adrian has mentioned, the whole model is a curious 'mongrel' of prototypes. Are they aiming these at the 'Thomas the Tank Engine' market or the serious railway modeller? There are plenty of models in OO that have been critcised for their innaccuracies and poor running quality, Heljan mucked up the Class 33 roof profile, Bachmann had big problems with the A1 motors burning out and having to be replaced, as did Heljan on their Clayton. Dapol's carden drive on the Pendelino sheared off which is why Hornby's version now has sole market share (lets not mention traction tyres, innacurrate pantograph and derailing issues). Even at the top end, FIA trains LMS 10000 'twins' couldn't manage a curved track because they hadn't allowed for a Cleminson style wheel arrangement or wheel side-play. Dapol must try and take the 'continuous product improvement' philosophy into O gauge, or they will end up looking a bit foolish. Their company philosophy is very much focussed towards a 'toy' purchaser, but there are plenty of 'toys' already if coarse scale is your bag, even if it isn't Lima O gauge and Triang Big Big train can still be obtained at rock bottom prices 2nd hand. Lets say (playing devils advocate) you saved up £500 for a Sang Cheng Brass R-T-R terrier http://www.finescalebrass.co.uk/o-gauge-locomotives/sr-terrier-lbsc-6xx-version.htm http://www.finescalebrass.co.uk/o-gauge-locomotives-sr-based/sr-terrier-island-version.htm , ran it for a couple of years unpainted, whilst saving up to comission a professional paint job from someone like Ian Rathbone or Simon Greenwood. That again will cost around £ 400 on a Terrier so if that's beyond you, why not have a go at painting yourself in a simple unlined Black livery. Then save up for transfers etc to add lining at a later date. The lacquer problem is a bit of a red herring here, once disassembled from the chassis a dunk in a bowl of nitromoors or similar would take all that off and you have to do something like that to prepare for the primer coat anyway. The lacquer is quite beneficial insofar as the body won't tarnish whilst you're saving up for a professional paint job! What I am saying is that if you have the WILL to attempt to build the kit, attempt to paint it and to sort out any running problems, you may just end up surprising yourself and learning a very useful skill into the bargain, that you can use in many other areas of life (e.g. car body repair, home decorating, fixing appliances). There's no 'black art' here, you just have to learn to be patient! Pressing the button on an aerosol rattle can (or airbrush if you have one) is about as hard as it gets! After a few years you will have a model that will be of higher quality than an Ixion or Dapol r-t-r version, which will be plastic and diecast whitemetal for ever and a day, regardless of how much 'superdetailing' you add. The skills to build an O gauge kit are exectly the same as those required to build an OO layout, a bit of basic metal forming, soldering, filing, mounting a motor and gearbox (no harder than taking an OO Triang X04 motor model apart and putting back together), spray painting, transfers etc. If you do that already in OO, doing it in O is no harder. Looking at their wagon offerings so far, and the huge number of listings on e-bay going unsold of the open wagons, it doesn't appear that Slaters or Parkside Dundas have too much to concern themselves with to date. The SR brake van is a definite improvement, but not perfect, the Milk tankers look like a step backward again, and until I see a Terrier in the flesh I very much doubt Finescale Brass have anything to worry about. When Dapol start to 'raise the bar' then I will sit up and take notice, but imho so far it hasn't yet happened. I can see no mention at all of their releases on the R-T-R section of the Gauge O Guild forum, so it appears the Guild membership are similarly unmoved and underwhelmed, even if the OO modellers looking into O gauge think they're the best thing since sliced bread ( and all O gauge modellers are elitist rivet counters ).

Not at all, there is nothing 'elitist' about wanting something to be 'the best it can be'. Reality should not in itself be a reason to thwart ambition. All manufacturers should attempt to achieve the best possible model they can, given that in this day and age we can laser scan, access preserved examples, purchase original works drawings from resources like the NRM, etc. A manufacturer who gets it wrong, gets it wrong, full stop. Who today would choose to purchase a Lima model of a Deltic, in preference to a Bachmann? Very few I'll wager, regardless of price differential. But in O gauge is it acceptable that a manufacturer should make the same kind of errors that Lima were making way back when, especially when you are shelling out £ 200 for a model? Not in my book it isn't. Some degree of compromise is always present, but the mistakes Dapol have made not just with their current range, but also with previous offerings ( anyone care to remember the reliability and running of their 4mm Pendelino ) do not bode well. Wether this stems from their senior management, or is a company 'culture' I don't know, but it seems to me we should be supportive of those who seek to ensure standards of accuracy, reliabilty and quality do not slip. Yes O gauge offers all the percieved benfits of 'presence', but it also offers the benefit of improvement in detail, and fidelity to prototype modelled. That the models should be accurate is surely a given, considering that Bachmann, Hornby and Heljan have made huge strides forward in OO from what Lima were offering less than 15 years ago or so.

I am fully in agreement with Adrian here. I started in 0 gauge in 2008, the first model I purchased was a kit built Parkside Dundas 25T Brake Van s/h off e-bay - cost ? £ 38.50 plus p+p. Built, painted, weathered and ready to run! Not much more than the price of the unbuilt kit. That's half the price of a R-T-R Dapol offering, and not much more than 2 OO coaches. Since then I've purchased plenty more s/h wagons, and if one arrives in a poor state I take my tools to it and fix it, even if that means purchasing a new kit to cannabalise for spare parts. I've repaired broken brake gear, replaced and re-sprayed roofs, weathered, added weight, adjusted axlebox heights to eliminate 'wobble', straightened or exchanged wonky wheels, changed couplings etc. The only skill you need is the confidence to snap/file/cut/unsolder off the offending part and replace it with a brand new one. That's no skill at all, just a realisation that you cannot make an omlette without breaking eggs! If you can build a kit, it doesn't matter if it's in OO, O or from Airfix, you can build a kit! A Parkside Dundas kit is not any harder than a Hornby 'Dunster' station. The problem is that with the resin building ranges, modellers are losing these skills, and the cheap kits with which to develop them. Dapol's new models do worry me however. I was disappointed with their open wagons, and I have agreed with all the coments Adrian has made on accuracy regarding the SR brake van. Just because it's O and not OO doesn't mean I will accept a lowering of standards in model fidelity. If they are adopting the 'Skytrex' approach to accuracy then the modern consumer, used to the fidelity of their OO models, won't put up with a range of models where the errors are not only there, but glaringly obvious and can be spotted by anyone with a keen and critical sense of observation. Bachmann ultimately failed with their O gauge range because of a commercial realisation that the market just wasn't there. In the main their models were tremendous value and very accurate - Dapol wil have to at least match, and ideally exceed, this level of performance to succeed long term, and to do this at a low cost is going to be extremely challenging.

You don't have to fill the container, nor do you have to package the model singly, it can be delivered in combination with other items. Most of these ltd editions will be air-freighted anyway, so they'd have to be unpacked from the lorry container into an aircraft hold at some point.

Do you remember that bloke on James Mays Toy Stories who showed off his Wrenn collection to Mr May, but refused to let him get any out of the box and moaned about the fact that locomotives had actually been used instead of left untouched in their boxes - these are the kind of people who frankly, need to ' get out more '. I did some research, apparantly he is Chairman of the Wrenn collectors club. I watched the Antiques Roadshow yesterday, and Henry Sandon, the porcelain expert, said much the same about ' Franklin Mint ' collectors plates.

I'm very surprised that carton quantities are the overiding concern on the size of the production run. Manufacturers put all their locomotives in a range of standard size cardboard outer boxes, only the internal polystyrene or nowadays polythene insert is special, but again that is a vacuum formed item, which has to be produced using a special metal mould tooling ( albeit one that is a lot less expensive to produce than one for an injection moulded locomotive body ). Labels can be printed in any quantity you like using a cheap HP desktop printer to a bespoke offset litho printed self adhesive label depending on how ' fancy ' you want the box to look. If the modeller is only concerned about the locomotive, then the box will most likely end up in the recycling along with all the other household waste ( or at least it could well do in my household ). Lets face it, why on earth did the NRM pack a pointless piece of blue perspex with their Deltic ltd edition, it was utterly unnecessary and pointless if you plan to use your locomotive on a layout. It was also an incredibly expensive piece of blue perspex as well. If I want a display track for a locomotive then I can nail a bit of track to a piece of wood, ballast it myself, and hey-presto, for a fraction of the price of that blue thing. Hornby get away with it by putting a specially printed cardboard collar over a standard box, Modelzone just stick a triangular label on a standard box, Heljan do absolutely sweet FA to the box ( and use a simple but very effective foam insert which should be the way every loco is packaged ), but print a special inner card for that particular locomotive ( as do Bachmann ) but none of this packaging is absolutely necessary. It could just as easily come in a brown cardboard kraft box stapled together for all I care ( and you can get these from any box supplier ). If people were happy to accept their locomotives hand packaged with polystyrene chips or bubble wrap to protect them ( like kit manufacturers do ), then the issue about producing cartons goes away.

To add to my last post, there are other ways of producing prototype models but I'm not certain that people like Sanda Kan ( who used to make Hornby products ) or Kader ( who own Bachmann ) use them. The area of Rapid Prototyping is a very recent development, and investment in these Rapid Prototyping machines is also very expensive ( and far beyond the ability of someone like Roderick Bruce at OO works to invest in at the moment ). Essentially they use a scanning laser to cure a mix of resin and glass beads, and the model is built up from the 3D computer model in thousands of very thin layers, each one only microns thick. This way you end up with a solid lump, but you can't easily reproduce re-entrant detail this way, as you can with a moulding tool. The material is also quite brittle and inflexible, so again it's only really suitable for checking basic shapes, not for producing something that has to be flexible enough that someone can bend it over chassis lugs, or tap it with a screw thread. But you never know, these things do have a tendancy to become cheaper over time. Maybe we will see a return to manufacturing R-T-R products in the UK in the not-to-distant future. However I am digressing away from the thread topic here, so I'll shut up.

These are probably kit-built mock-ups, and not representative of the finished article ( the 4-CEP shown in Bachmann's early photographs was built from a DC Kits kit ). You can manufacture items in resin, using cheap rubber tooling, but the tooling will deteriorate every time it is used ( this is how people like OO Works, or Silver Fox, produce their limited production runs ). Basically you are making a locomotive shaped candle ! After a few hundred items this type of tooling is worn out - it is not suitable for manufacturing large batch sizes. This is why Bachmann and Hornby always specify a minimum quantity of around 500 for each limited edition. The accountants have told them that this is how many that they have to produce ( and sell ) to pay back the investment in the metal tooling ( and all the other things like raw material, labour costs, design and development, production of artwork for tampo printing the livery, but that's true for every model produced by them ).

If you have time to do so, yes. The problem is that, unless you are fluent in Mandarin, or the supplier is fluent in English, mistakes can still slip through. By the time pre-production samples are made it's far too late, the production tooling has already been machined in metal to produce these ( and for injection moulding these tools cost tens of thousands of pounds each ). The pre-production sample are exactly that PRE-PRODUCTION, not pre-tooling. So by that stage you are at the point of no return ( unless you can afford to throw away tens of thousands of pounds and produce new tooling to replace the erroneous first iteration ). Most errors have to be corrected on the drawings, or the CAD model, at the critical design review, before tooling is started. And if all the detailed dimensions are in Chinese characters, I, as an English engineer, wouldn't have a clue as to what they meant!

For all we know, BOTH motor bogies may have to be motorised if the LIMBY motor bogie is used, it's haulage capacities are notoriously poor, so the model would be even MORE accurate in this respect. Hornby have probably done this to minimise the development time ( realising that they are already running behind schedule in bringing it to market ), and to keep development costs down ( which will be reflected in the RRP and the profit margin they can use to re-invest in future product development ). In actual fact, given the amount of money they've borrowed from share-holders and investors to expand their empire they probably don't have any option but to keep the development costs down.

Yes but these editions were all pre-existing or based upon pre-existing tooling. This is slightly different because we don't know who is responsible for producing the tooling or the moulding work ( I'm assuming they're going down the Chinese route ). The very fact that these models are drawn and detailed thousands of miles away, and that there is a Mandarin - English language barrier , where certain subtleties of the English Language are not easy to translate, worries me that things will get lost in translation. REs are now entering the world of trying to control a sub-contractor, and I speak from bitter experience in my normal line of work, that they will really have to keep their eye on the ball to avoid mistakes being made. We were all lead to believe that Vi Trains Class 37's would be superior to the Bachmann offering, and in my opinion, they're not, and they have a much poorer mechanism and chassis fitted to-boot. I also think that the Vi Trains Class 47 is worse than the Bachmann one, but Mr Sutton seems to think that they are the superior product - again I disagree because for me, reliability performance, and running qualities, are more important than the accuracy of the shape. For me the Heljan 47 is fine, because of it's bomb proof build quality and performance.

I for one am not likely to place an advance order (especially at that price level) because I'm not convinced they're any less fallible in this respect. If it can happen to Heljan, Bachmann, Ixion (and there are probably others as well on the Continent or the USA) it can happen to them to. I'll wait until I see the finished article before I part with what is a significant sum for me.

Can someone post a link to reviews of the O gauge model? I saw the pre-production samples at Telford last year and purchased a Tower Models Ltd Edition example. I realise it is an early livery on a late bodyshell, but that was a decision made by Tower Models, not Heljan.

I thought Mr Sutton was employed by Heljan as UK consultant on the original 33/0 model, so he surely must take some responsibility for the flawed model. I believe this gives some explanation as to why Heljan were reluctant to accept his criticism in reviews. If he is in charge of an upgraded model what assurances are there that history won't repeat itself ? Heljan have just released an accurate 0 gauge model, so they clearly have the option to release an upgraded model in 4mm if they think they won't lose money on it, but they haven't.

I've got to agree with this and in these cash straightened times surely this is a recipie for commercial suicide. Most people will have bought a large number of Heljan 33/0 's if they were ever likely to buy one ( they have been around for 6 or 7 years now ), and to expect them to just throw them away for a new loco is stupid. Now a case for just producing replacement bodies seems much more sensible, but not at silly prices. And the number of liveries proposed is limited compared to what is possible, or wanted.