fiftyfour fiftyfour

Agree on all counts. Now that I've stood the Bachmann beside the Hornby I can see what needs doing to "Bachmann-ise" the Hornby ones to make a rake and not spend £300 replacing six perfectly good coaches I already own. Add a film inside the windows to tint them up a bit more, repaint the interiors on both, take the moulded handrail off the Hornby and replace with wire and dust over the roofs to "turn them down" a bit. The underframes are interesting, I can't find any evidence of the real coaches having the step boards other than those directly below the doors picked out- the red springs are right for a newly outshopped (see below, not my photo!). I will add Railtec CDL lights to the Hornby and that is the challenge, I think a coating of gloss varnish with a little dark brown paint mixed in onto the CDL lights before application will make them look a bit more like the Bachmann, will do a test one before the other six!

Just need a retooled spoon to haul them! I've only ordered the RFM for now to see how it looks with the 2000-ish Hornbys, which have hardly ever been run so not wanting to upgrade at over £50 a coach unless the difference is stark.

Swapping out for the Strathpeffer CD motors, done it on one HST power car so far but will attack the 47's and 37's when I've decided which are for "long term" operation.

They don't help their own cause by not "maxing out" on existing moudlings. Only 3 new 158's so far, and the 150/2 is still to be released in many liveries carried by multiple class members. The Provincial "running man" Sprinter version as worn by all 85 of them still hasn't been done, nor has the Wessex purple/pink which was a staple livery for many years.

I'm in a similar boat, could afford to replace everything with the latest release but will only buy selectively because I don't want to bin the Lima 47's I've had for over 25 years. I grew up with those models and have put effort into them - their only drawback for me is the noise/performance and that is now addressable without spending £200 on a loco and putting the old one in the bin.

I do like that "The 158 man" has 158 posts at time of writing. Now if someone is on 47554 postings can they please reply to this to put us firmly back on topic...

All ScR trailers are ex FGW (as are all power cars!) so they will have the darker tinted windows.

Unless someone says otherwise (!!) they all had the same bronze tint as built, and the next significant change was on the First Great Western "refresh" between 2006-2008 (the one that introduced squiggly lines) when their vehicles received a noticeably darker tint whilst everyone else retained original looking (but probably using a different spec of lamination) during their refits.

If you've got OHE you are just showing off! There really isn't a reason why the figures should look as bad as they have done in years gone by, I accept that at some stage I will have to undo my Bachmann Class 57 in Porterbrook purple and silver to do a crew change and retire my shiny purple blob man. Bachmann themselves do a reasonable set of crew which retail at about £12 for six, so fixing one of them into the seat of a £250 loco shouldn't send it above £252. I suppose it all boils down to one question- does a driver going backwards in the rear of a loco look worse than a vacant cab going forwards?!

What would be so wrong with giving us a driver only (later liveries) and a two-man crew (pre 1990) using decent figures in one-end only? I hate having to dismantle a brand new and very expensive loco to install a 1:76 card-carrying ASLEF brother in to avoid having a driverless leading cab. I've been moving towards a "driven" end (with crew, pipes and no couplings) and a non driven end and just using the hand of god to swing the loco around if I want to go the other way with it...

amen to that. It's a normal working day every day on my layout, the carnival doesn't come to town as often as some people think. Hornby are the worst for this, at least Bachmann have realised the folly of faux celebrity...

Wow, looks fantastic- clearly onto a winner there. For those who "need to save up" to buy one/three/ten of these- you probably can't really afford it in that case. Your choice how you spend your dosh, but please don't tell the rest of us you don't want them coming without "fair warning" when for so long now we have associated Bachmann with crushingly long waits between announcement and release and surely that is just as hard to budget for. 828 is an old tub, but at time of writing the only loco I've driven on the mainline AND in preservation! Might finally prompt me to replace some (but not all) Limas provided the liveries are right and the price isn't too naughty. A GW150 green one would tip me over the edge, as might a Parcels sector one, or anything mid 80's to late 90's that I associate with being an unapologetically Western region one...

The drawgear/no drawgear thing comes down to aesthetics vs the occasional operational convenience. The chaps on the depot managed to put up HST drawbars with no fuss in 30 seconds, but I accept its different for someone doing it for the first time ever in real life in a pressure situation out on the mainline where underfoot conditions are less than ideal. The HST to HST bar is actually far easier, so we would always prefer a back-to-back pair as rescue locos vs a 47 or whatever. The original Blue Pullman was an unmitigated disaster. What happened inside the carriages delivered by uniformed staff has nothing at all to do with the technical quality and reliability of the train. You could fit tables of four and a kitchen area in a Pacer, but you've still got a Pacer, albeit one with tablecloths and a priority limited stop pathing....

They have moved on a lot since those days, by understanding how cooler groups needed to be maintained (after some false starts) and then later inventing the Brush cooler group to replace the original Marston units which took them to the top of the learning curve. You are comparing what existed in the 1970's and 1980's with what exists now, which in engineering terms is like saying "I'm not buying a 2015 Ford Focus because my 1975 Ford Cortina used to break down a lot". What the HST power cars in the LSL fleet probably will suffer from most is lack of regular use (we shall see if the Staycation performs better) and being divorced from Neville Hill, which had become very good at what they did (GWR depots should stop reading now) rather than bodge it up and kick it out again. They were helped by a healthy spare power car availability, and by the ability to limp home on one- not an option for LSL and especially not when a mountain stands between you and home as it did on Saturday. Putting buffers on simply to replicate "the Blue Pullman"? Why not just replace the whole cab if you are that fussed about it. I'm still bewildered as to why you would want the most successful diesel train ever built to look like the least successful one because the passage of 50 years has dulled the memory, but its their money. Lastly modern locos with drop head buckeyes (class 66, 67 etc) need the adapter fitting to attach to HST, it was standard kit on the ECML ones and every single one of those bar 43208/239/290/299/302 is currently parked in a field somewhere so there should be about 25 of them doing nothing much!

and ruin the classic Kenneth Grange front end? I don't agree.

The early NSE one is just as scarce, I've been on the look out for one. So even just a different number on the large logo and on the NSE would probably sell very well and require little effort by Hornby. Just not a sodding faux celebrity or survivor though please, I know that we can't have an anonymous un-named one for obvious reasons. My three (having 54 is mental!) have all been modified with red lights isolated as I never run light engines, and those stupid bright red rad fans painted black along with the surrounding brilliant white gubbins. I'm sure they only did the fans red so we could see their willy waving pointless feature!!

Well that will do one socket, what about everything else?! I need to see first hand as well, extra jumpers would sound like the only way of doing it, and some sort of switching device so that the power car ETS can still feed the caterers if the gen set doesn't work/overheats/runs out of fuel or whatever.

And what does that weigh, because if it's over 0.8 tonnes (which it obviously will be) then its too heavy for the luggage van and they would have to go through assorted vehicle acceptance hurdles which are not easy to overcome. Also interested to see how they have wired it in, you cannot just add a diesel generator as a supplementary into the three phase ETS supply.

and a vent thing on the roof for whatever is in there. And a new cut out facing the carriage with another grille in the place where the original guards van windows were. There are a lot to detail differences now unique to this train.

The Staycation HST is on the prediction list for 2022, as is the EMR combo of 43102 (IC Swallow) and 43274 (revolting purple) and absolutely nothing of any relevance to anyone modelling pre 2020. A "Deerstalker Express" with a 67 and Scotrail Mk3's would probably inspire more modellers...

There isn't a 43234.

You are right, the barrier to entry for bidders is too high in that respect, so in many ways it no advance on franchising. The likes of Abellio and DB can afford to lose money on UK rail as their largess or errors are bankrolled by the state back home, much as the piles of profit they stand to make reduce the subsidy back home. It's been a long standing joke that only UK based state owned entities are barred from bidding for UK franchises, and by the same extension they will not be able to bid for concessions.

OfQ was the obvious privatisation model. So that was ditched for a fragmented blame culture mess instead, obviously.

and given the hysteria surrounding the real life 43102 (and to a lesser extent 43274) such a pack should do well- and they will need the reflective birdies for 43102 as the real one carried the correct stick-on ones as they were trying to replicate "record breaking" condition! And yes, Railtec is worth the wait when a wait is what it takes- I waited for the stuff I needed and I'm very happy with it.

And that is the trouble. After 40 years of right wing indoctrination as soon as anyone talks about an employee owned business which has partners instead of staff people say "Lenin" before they say "John Lewis". I feel I need to ask, how many self employed people do you think go on strike?! There is efficiency in an employee owned model as long as it doesn't become a top heavy, inefficient lumbering organisation that just wastes money and leeches off profit, and the employee owned (and possibly union offshoot organised) structure is a whole world away from nationalised, but Thatcher (and Major) have told you that private is good/public is bad so many times and for so long that you've forgotten that a badly managed, under funded and generally neglected utility became the norm here but the exception elsewhere in Europe, notably in Germany where state owned railways became a beacon of efficiency.