fiftyfour fiftyfour

It's probably been asked before but I can't find it by searching! Can anyone recommend or point me towards a source of flat acetate sheet (or similar) to turn clear windows into bronze tinted windows. Ebay searches pull up coloured sheets but none in brown or bronze. The application is for a model bus kit, I had a sheet a long while ago from Howes which was ideal and used inside Lima Mk3 coaches at the time but now sadly all used up.

Doing nothing and churning out more slam door Mk3s using the now 20 year old moulding would suit very nearly every single modeller who doesn't care about the coaches and will accept anything as long as the loco hauling them has micromillimeter perfect roof grills and door handle positions. My evidence for this is my total inability to flog 76 seat replacement interiors despite Hornby having sold tens of thousands of coaches with either original 1976 layout standard class innards, or even worse the first class 2+1 layout in standard class coaches as per the IC Swallow releases in 2020. Not that I'm bitter or anything!!!!! Slam door Mk3's might be done on the mainline (which is true bar the GWR sleeper and some charter rakes) but given the length of their careers and the appetite for loco models in the 1976-2020 period you'd have thought the market was still fairly large going forward.

Be fair, the Hornby ones do bounce along the track!! (and they are at least 35 years old). Looking forward to the Skipper, when/how do we order?

Nope, that is the one number that we already have (the Hornby Skipper was 142015). There are 12 other Skippers to choose from, so any other number would be preferable. Oh, and Cornwall beats Devon in every meaningful measure- I hope the destinations will be easily changeable by the amateur modeller as they are on the Bachmann 150/2 for example! What is the anticipated release date of these?

No, I'm from the RailAdventure sales team!! 8th Feb minus 1st Dec equals 2 months and 7 days by my maths, and you are correct- they have yet to haul anything in that livery and in answer to others I'm 99.9% sure they didn't move under their own power in Germany but am happy to be corrected. So yes, it's even more of a luxury model than the 8 coaches more expensive Midland Pullman at the moment, but I gather that RailAdventure have contracts (either won or in bidding) which will see them used; either that or they are rotten businessmen buying six power cars and two more for spares and spending the money on a works visit for them to sit idle and not earn them a Euro. And yes, I'd rather have had a pair of power cars in Executive livery, FGW Barbie or even a 43102 Swallow/43274 EMR Aubergine pair than the RailAdventure cars but we are stuck with them, but not compelled to buy them...

423/467 left Willesden on 1st December, so if you are seeing them from tube or LO services you must have amazing eyesight. 480/484 were last moved around the same time when they were taken (by road) from Immingham to Eastleigh having spent a few weeks in Germany touring around within a formation not under their own power.

Or just run a blade around the door frame, cut it out and reglue it in the open position. You get your open door, we don't all pay an extra £20 or whatever for an oversized gap around it!! HSTs would rarely have run at speed with the doors open, it's just awful driving one over about 70mph like that.

The numbers are wrong on the front of 43006- it should be 253003 not 254029. What a pity nobody photographed the real thing during the four days it was out allowing Hornby to check that....

You are probably right. And it's probably the same people that would angrily take to another forum thread if the bodyside grille on their Class 90 had one too few slats! You only have to momentarily glance through the window, even on an unlit interior, to see that the 'signature' Mk3 seat to window misalignment in standard class hasn't been replicated, or even attempted.

You'd have needed some medical aid on 15/06/1996 then- a full and not in any way modified 2+8 HST set ran the whole route from Stratford to Norwich fully laden with punters on a special from Plymouth operated by Hertfordshire Railtours and powered by 43022+43187! Or on 29/06/1997 when 43012+43185, also on a similar eight car train full of passengers, ran from Liverpool St to Southminster and Southend Vic on another special. Teasing aside, this has been a massive problem with NR across the board- they wouldn't accept that a HST can run Grantham to Skegness until someone produced proof that they had been before, and there are various other routes that they are banned over on paper despite having been before, the most recent example of which I can recall was Carlton Road Jcn-Harringey which was a definite "no, you can't possibly go that way" (with the EMT farewell special) until it was pointed out that they had allowed an ECS move that way every weekday for several months. I'm v.sceptical that all Mk3s that ever ran on Anglia were modified as you describe, the Pretendolino set and various other short term uses of ex Virgin coaches can't all have been modified and then de-modified to normal just to run a few trips over there.

This thread, like so many others, has been muddied by people moaning about price- this time on a model which still hasn't been announced properly yet including some who are steam era and have already declared they won't be buying an HST regardless of price. You obviously all saw a different program to me- the one I saw was telling me the only power car changes are a new coupling, a new set up for the illumination of the frontal lighting to allow digital users to define which headlight is on and a minor tweak to a luggage van door handle, on a luggage van layout which is ONLY correct for 43018 as it is now, ie a one-piece window but with the guards van windows reinstated. The problems with the coaches are two fold- to go with CDL or not to go with CDL- either way it's wrong depending on which side of 1994 it's depicting, and then how many buffet car variations to run with (although the obvious answer to me is two- one 403xx/407xx three windower and one 402xx/404xx four windower) and let those who want some weird limited run buffet (like 40619 or the 408xx) make do with the nearest equivalent. Talk of coaches is academic anyway, there was no mention of any coach improvements in the program, not even quick fix basic ones let alone all singing, all dancing ones.

I still prefer the Lima coaches, add flushglazing and tidy them up a bit and they are better than the Hornby scale length. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY seems to care about the interior layout so they can give us whatever they want again and there will be no moans when they give us 48 seat first class layouts in TS vehicles or 72 seat layouts wrong for every livery post 1985 that lack the signature seat to window misalignment on the real thing. Oxford had their chance and blew it, see the woeful Virgin TSO for details. Echoing other comments, there are still a lot of liveries missed by Hornby on their existing HST cars whilst they chase the latest celebrity (pretty much all those between 1997 and 2007), or issued once with insufficient quantities (eg IC Executive). And no, I still don't know why people want opening cab doors or fans that spin around either...

This is VERY worrying. The Mark Hopwood fan club thinks he is great, he himself thinks he has "turned it around" and "has sorted it out" so the ills are blamed on Network Rail, ROSCOs, DfT or anyone else but themselves. I worked for the old FGW structure for six years until 2006 and left to work for another operator and I could see it was getting worse then- we were getting flak almost daily from the passengers and I watched the quality of the product take a nosedive despite our best efforts. You will always get a few awkward squad in any organisation but I don't recognise a "f*** 'em" culture among the train crews- conversely I'm constantly told "we used to sign those or we used to go there but they took that off us". GWR has chosen to create an inflexible workforce, it has not provided sufficient incentive to crews to work Sundays or come up with a deal that comes close to what they deserve to bring Sundays inside the working week, it has barely got enough crews to run a reduced service on the other six days of the week so even if Sundays were brought into the working week they would be chronically short on the other days of the week. The rolling stock on the West side needs sorting out; non air-con suburban layout 165/166 are a retrograde step on routes like Cardiff-Portsmouth, due to an assortment of management issues Laira is unable to field enough "Castle" HST sets for the small number of diagrams they run which leads to short forms across the business and on the sets they do kick out there are usually faults like air-con failures or sliding internal doors broken. At least on LTV services they have seemingly every single Class 387 ever built so even with their worst in industry reliability the rainbow of liveries are generally able to support the reduced service. It's sort of therapeutic to be able to vent my feelings on the GWR service here- on about 7 out of the 10 times I have used GWR over the last 6 months the only "safety valve" has been to say out loud "Oh for f*** sake!!" after checking a station screen or phone app and finding my journey is going to be very badly delayed or simply impossible on that day. That is the reality on the ground, Hopwood and GWR have a mountain to climb- if they think they are near the top then they are seriously deluded- now that we have passed through the pandemic, the significant crew training program instigated by the cascade of stock and the disruptive electrification program the business should be in a better place than being barely out of sight of base camp. I grant you that things improved on SWR when Hopwood went over there, but when you start off with Mellors in charge even the surviving Chuckle brother would be an improvement. Conversely GWR got a bit better by most measures whilst Galton was temporarily at the helm. A question for you- do you use the GWR service and do you think its all fine?

Begs the question why is GWR in such deep difficulties then? https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/search/detailed/gb-nr:BTH/2021-10-03/0000-2359?stp=WVS&show=pax-calls&order=wtt&toc=GW and that is on the severely reduced timetable for Covid on a day when there was no engineering on any route directly served from there....

I agree 100% with paragraph 1, I'd certainly not volunteer for overtime under the current management climate. I disagree 100% with paragraph 2! I'd sack the whole lot of them starting at the top, the business is failing at all levels and by all reasonable measures and other owning groups wouldn't touch the GWR team past or present with a barge pole. Can you name one single meaningful measure by which GWR could be rated above any other TOC? Mellors was perhaps worse fractionally worse whilst at GWR and now at SWR because he oversaw every single GWR fleet plummet to the bottom of the MPC/MTIN tables, and that includes ALL tractions they then operated; Class 143, Class 150, Class 153, Class 158, Class 165/166, HST, Class 387- the full set. Hopwood has failed to get a grip on ANY issue, instead of delivering on the promised timetable we have had a string of excuses and the only one I accept as being outside their control is the IET cracks. Non delivery of the significantly reduced weekday timetable is entirely down to GWR, and the Sunday situation is utter farce. At least EMR, and I suppose ScotRail to an extent, have taken sensible steps to tell intending passengers what to expect from them on a Sunday which allows them to choose other modes, although in the case of ScotRail the "no service at all" message is very damaging, but perhaps less so than GWRs weekly chaos. I doubt anyone on GWRs executive team other than Hopwood has even 10 years experience on the railway and none of them can blame 'legacy' issues as First Group has been wrecking that service now since 2006 and longer for most constituent elements. It's a source of black humour that the original 1996 GWT set-up promised to "empty the M4" whereas GWR has managed to overfill it- it's the often the sole option and the coach operators must love GWR. As a rail passenger I most certainly do not.

SSO after a train has passed the previous station should be communicated to the driver by the signaller, stopping the train if necessary to tell the driver. The situation on 1A58 was 100% GWRs own creation, the reason it was stopping additionally was the THREE HOUR gap in what should be a half-hourly service on a busy InterCity route at a time of peak demand. Chopping and changing SSOs is a recipe for confusion and the control should have anticipated how busy the train would be even before the SSOs- giving passengers, train crew and signallers different messages all adds to the impression of a company managed by gross incompetents, correctly so in the case of GWR.

Privatisation has largely failed to deliver over here, crucially since many companies reached the end of franchises where they carried a commercial risk and went onto direct awards effectively paying them a % to just run services; GWR has been the longest standing example of such a deal since their franchise ended in c2014. They are not unique in this and other operators including franchised operators have their woes (EMR, ScotRail and West Midlands Trains for example are each embroiled in a self inflicted crisis delivering Sunday services) but GWR has it worst and has failed to get any kind of grip meaning there not even "jam tomorrow" for the optimists. There are a number of other factors afflicting GWR which include but are not limited to diverse traction types which not all crews have knowledge of, low morale among staff leading to high sickness levels and disinclination to do overtime, disastrously poor management of fleet maintenance resulting in their various fleets being right at the bottom of reliability tables by a shocking margin and a general culture of "can't do" across the whole company.

I don't think they can amend the stopping pattern on an IET on route, on 1A59 it just kept saying the next stop is Reading and the Train Manager was doing announcements to cover the SSOs put into that. Hopwood is a joke and the buck has to stop somewhere. The previous time I tried using GWR there was also a three hour gap in service without good reason, and that was Saturday 25/09 from Bristol to Bridgwater when they caped the 1356 at 1415 (no guard) and the 1455 was already cancelled, no traincrew. They have totally failed to manage the situation regarding crew availability on Mondays to Saturdays, cancellations have been horrendous and usually announced some time AFTER the train should have gone and typically leaving passengers stranded on remote stations with no/little information and certainly no alternative but to stand there listening to endless recorded "Safety", "security" or "penalty fare" announcements. The amount of cancellations during the summer was so high that well over 50% of trains I intended to catch did not run at all. Sundays are outside the working week for drivers, and I suspect guards as well and GWR has done nothing meaningful to address that, either by negotiating them into the working week or giving proper incentive for staff to work them. We might not like the EMR service on Sundays but at least it's "reliably thin" so passengers can plan around it, GWR is just "cancel it as we go along". And don't get me started on the condition of the fleet, breakdowns and short formations are the norm on "West" services and (not all their fault) there is no recovery to a full/fully formed service in sight on IET worked routes. How bad does it have to get before Hopwood resigns?!

I was there (sort of*). The service provided by GWR yesterday was an utter, utter, utter disgrace. There were NO trains from Bristol Temple Meads, Bath or Chippenham to Paddington between the 1700 and the 2000. The 1730, 1800 and 1830 were all cancelled, and the 1900 and 1930 never existed. I arrived at 1850 and sussed out the only way would be to get the 1931 XC to Bristol Parkway and join a Swansea to Padd there. However... they were diverting Penzance/Plymouth to Padd trains via Bristol TM as the B&H was blocked (pre planned) somewhere and they announced at 1915 that 1A59 1518 Pnz-Pad would stop additionally at Bristol TM (and Bath, and Chippenham, and Swindon) so I caught that. Then at Swindon, now about 8 late we got held and the reason given was a train ahead had suffered numerous alarm activations and would return to Swindon for POLICE attention. After a few minutes 1A59 got the road to run past bi-directional on the down road from Swindon station to Bourton where it regained the up, we passed 1A58 1418 Pnz-Pad at caution and conditions on there were horrendous, there were c50-60 people stood down the aisle of each coach, the vestibules had 10-15 people crushed into each. 1A59 got past the scene 20 late, 1L92 behind got through with only about 4 mins of delay. 1A58 had changed ends when 1A59 passed and it eventually returned to Swindon, then changed ends again and pined at Reading 104 late. I estimate there were 1200 people on board, the next Bristol to London (the 2000 ex Bristol, starting there vice Taunton) was only a five car so I imagine not many cleared by that. GWR management should resign, starting with Hopwood. The media should be all over this, there was NO engineering at all at any location between Bristol and London yesterday, all lines were open.

The interiors on the Virgin TSOs are totally wrong, wrong colours, entirely the wrong seat layout which should be the 76 seat/10 table of 4 layout. They stick out like a sore thumb, you could just about get away with the wrong interiors if doing a very early Intercity 'swallow' livery and never running a Class 90 on the rake but there is no getting away with it on the Virgin TSOs. People will still buy them and pretend they are right. PM me if you want a solution...

Thanks. Answering my own question I did find a Mk2 air-con standard class interior shot in "The InterCity story" book and they had insides very similar to the link showing a non air-con, wood on the walls and bulkheads, black table tops and blue seats with purple headreast areas. I'm modelling Mk2D so not too fussed if they changed to cream formica on later derivatives. The only remaining question I have is what colour were the table tops in first class in open coaches?!

40,749 members and 40,749 different ways of interacting with the site. I drop in every few days to see what's newly released or newly announced covering the WR in the 1980s or 1990s, or to ask or react to the occasional question. If everyone paid £10 a year and the forum still lost money with income of £407,000 it's time to change servers!

I'd pay £10 a year. How much would everyone have to pay to have the site ad free? The new addition is VERY intrusive!!

Hmmm. "Pay us £60 a year or you won't be able to read the forum at all because the top 30% of your screen will be taken up by an advert and now the right hand 40% of the remaining screen has a bandwidth sucking video advert everytime you click to a new page". It is a business model I suppose, seriously reduces my visits to the site and I hope the advertisers notice that....

Tangent, but only slight- can anyone point me in the direction of photos of the interiors of Mk2 air-cons (both classes) in BR Blue livery please! Failing that what colour were the tables, what colour were the vestibules?