Mike Harvey

They look to be a good Grouping-era selection. The finesse of the cattle trucks is impressive.

The Arnold document I linked a few days back was their 2024 new items leaflet. It contains announced but so far undelivered items from earlier years and NEW items for 2024 which are marked NEW, It also shows in stock items but not 2023 (or earlier) new items which have already sold out. So the reader knows what is in stock and what is still to come.

Arnold’s 2024 combined N and TT catalog shows several new TT items including container and cereal wagons. TT from page 110 onwards:- https://d63oxfkn1m8sf.cloudfront.net/6517/0436/6501/Catalogo_2024_Arnold_N-TT_WEB.pdf

In the first week after its announcement the 9 car Azuma was the top selling train on the Hobby Search, Japan website. The best selling Japanese new trains were 9th, 11th and 14th.

My enduring memory of Peaks is looking back down the platform at Luton through clouds of steam on a cold winter morning with the train wheezing and creaking before the right away. Oh and a cab ride on D2 from Leicester to St. Pancras. It was like riding on a steam roller. Choosing just one on rule 1 will not be easy.

Just as I am about to launch off on some travelling, the postie delivered 4 x 1964 Morris 1100s printed in full colour by Westedge3D. With a ScaleModelScenery low relief backdrop hopefully you can appreciate the quality and charm of these N 1/148 scale models, designed I believe by @monkeysarefun Shop - West Edge 3D Sorry about the iPad picture quality but everything else is packed away.

That is a rather self-effacing comment, Pete. Good on you.

Tony Chlad’s London Trolleybus layout merited an extensive how to article series in Railway Modeller in 1998. After his death it was saved and is now being restored by Model Bus Federation members in Yorkshire. As well as scratchbuilt and converted trolleybuses, it also featured moving road traffic, trams, a DMU shuttle and a working JCB backhoe digging a trench.

Found the Tomytec turntable. Two versions. Surely Huddersfield needs one. :-) https://www.1999.co.jp/eng/10372916 https://www.1999.co.jp/eng/10222623

There is a classic case of misleading images on the Arnold webpage for an SNCF couchette coach in N which shows two coaches for a one coach item, but bizarrely the two coaches shown are not opposite sides of the same coach but completely different. One is a 10 compartment B10c10 and the other a nine compartment A4c4B5c5. The nine compartment has not even been announced so the photos are probably based on the H0 versions. I did tell them about it some time back and it was going to be changed.

Ben Ando has said elsewhere that the bespoke option will go live for ordering on the Revolution website next week.

The Farish and the Dapol Class 66s were first released in 2005 - so 18 years ago.

Most of the Revolution range is British N covering from their first model - the Pendolino - through Mk5 coaching stock, multiple units and modern locomotives on to a host of modern freight wagons - stone hoppers and box wagons, car transporters, ferryvans, tank wagons, as well as some older freight stock and an underground train. Pity if you missed out on seeing these at an exhibition. They probably have more tooling in recent years than any of the established UK N gauge manufacturers.

From when UIC numbering was introduced, if the wagon type does not include a small "f" then it is not:- 1) UK gauge, 2) UK ferry compatible. Typical UK ferry wagons would be Habfis, Ufs, Lfls, Uacfs, Laefss. Most of the ferryboat wagons in the German ranges would see service in Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Norway using the one-time ferry network there, and relatively few would be found in Sicily, Sardinia and the like.

Oxford has now published pre-production photos of the 4 N scale Fords. The Cortina MkV mould has been adjusted to reflect a more standard car. https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid0yKWoHGhdBnUqL6MrRjnauH1i28pNmKYmjUdrbDEHRAk26R8iMU7SbV8NE1pmuNVRl&id=100037041907809

Those of us drawing in 1:1 scale will have in mind the practicality of turning the model into a 3D printed version. So the size (or even the presence) of some details will be determined by what will be printable, as will the wall thickness of structures, etc. And, certainly in the smaller scales, what the eye can see and recognise needs to be taken into account. I have recently been drawing some fire stations for printing in 1/150 scale. The principal dimensions are drawn in 1:1 scale in SketchUp but the detail of the brickwork has needed to overemphasise the mortar courses for them to be visible in the final printed version. So in the SketchUp file a brick is surrounded by a 12mm deep and wide trench for it to be recognised as part of a brick wall when printed. That 12 mm mortar trench is printed as a 0.08mm channel inset by 0.08mm into the wall and looks convincing enough for me before detailed painting. From normal viewing distance it is a brick wall enhanced by the slight printing variations and clumsy priming.

I am another one who draws in 1:1 and then scales afterwards when converting to an .stl file.

The front track of the 7V was 5ft 4in according to my Haynes "History of Ford Vans Trucks and PSVs". So width over wheels was not much more than than with the thin tyres fitted at the time. Mudguards were of various widths, maybe related to the width of the body rather than the cab.

@Adam1701D I notice that the five car Chiltern set includes an FO and the artwork shows one car with the Business Zone branding which on the real trains is the ex-restaurant/buffet car included in the sets when the sliding plug doors were introduced. At least two of the sets still had the restaurant buffet car next to the DVT when I saw them at Marylebone last month..

Several stages are iterative so the first EP may require more than one round of changes to the tooling before moving to livery samples, again with more than one round to get everything right. Once the button is pressed to go to production, there is still the possibility that the production sample will throw up the need for changes which might be a misplaced label or a colour change, or wrong detail parts. Multiply all that by the number of cars in a multiple unit, motorised or not, multiply again by the number of livery variations, add in the design, production and drop testing of the packaging, production of data and instruction sheet, testing and documenting sound details, and it is a miracle that we end up with some lovely models. Unfortunately I do not think that anyone can attach a timescale to the sequence even if everything is perfect at every stage.

The Paddington Bear Class 800 was the second best selling model railway item over the whole of October on the Hobby Search Japan website. Kato might need a second run if the first batch sells out between February 2024 launch and the release of the next Paddington Bear movie in November 2024.

Just picking up on the coupler makers mentioned by @Michanglais if anyone is interested in importing from TJModèles I can confirm that Thomas does ship outside France. I have provided for Pého closecouplers in my Corail chassis 3D prints in N and their couplers are available from several retailers across mainland Europe who send to the UK.

The announcements have generally been on the first Wednesday of February, May, August and November. So if the pattern is being followed it would be Wednesday 1 November.

They cannot all be picked, packed, invoiced and despatched at once. Lots of factors come into play - order size and completeness, status of retailer’s account and credit limits, whether a wholesaler is an intermediary for some manufacturers, carrier schedules, and available time.

There were at least three builds of the phosphorous tanks running to Langley Green owned by VTG, Eva and On Rail. With the availability of the LHB style of bogie in TT:120 I suspect that a 3D print is more likely than a ready to run model. Mike Roch has started upscaling some of his N chemical tank designs. https://www.shapeways.com/shops/maridunian-models?page[number]=1&page[limit]=48&page[order]=asc