fiftyfour fiftyfour

Comes back to how risk averse you want the railway to be. Nobody wants an accident of any kind, but also nobody wants to have services routinely suspended or running at severely reduced speeds "just in case". The one bit of line the driver of 1T08 considered to be clear was Carmont to Stonehaven on the down as he had observed it to be clear from the up road, and still this happened. We have already started to see knee-jerk heavy TSRs and service suspensions on the strength of a maybe, which will force passengers onto the roads where they are statistically far more likely to be involved in an accident and vastly more likely to be involved in a fatal accident.

Thanks. After doing 12 interiors (912 seats) in IC red and then doing 12 interiors (also 912 seats) in GWT green and 4 interiors (288 seats after luggage rack mod) in Virgin XC green/grey I was glad to reach the end of my fleet!!

If anything the white and red bands are too low on the TGS, the TS looks nearer right. Before the 1814 departure from Mantelpiece sets off a quick desperate plug for my replacement interiors for the TS's which are still in stock...

It's the same complaint though. They are too dear to buy (as we march confidently towards £244 for a single power car without sound/decoder) and the amount of time since they last bothered to do any of the earlier liveries and resulting scarcity means we are seeing crazy prices for an RTR power car and dummy car when they show up on eBay. It's my contention that Hornby have restricted supply to inflate the price and maintain it high, even if we are happy to respray ourselves to achieve the liveries Hornby didn't do or have long overlooked we cannot source sensibly priced donor vehicles! Let's face it, well over half of sales of the Midland Pullman will be to "stash it away, never open the box merchants"...

The EMR ECS runs are so short as to be negligible, they barely go over five miles without passengers on whereas I suppose someone will defend their purchase of the Midland Pullman on the basis that it has to transit from Eastleigh or Crewe to wherever its starting from/finishing at each time! I don't disagree with you- and I don't have a problem with Hornby releasing a 43102/274 pairing provided that some little glimmer of hope is offered to those of us not modelling Leeds-St Pancras between 14/04/2021 and 15/05/2021 by the release of, for example, MML 2nd livery, any of the GWT/FGW liveries before dynamic lines and either/both of the liveries applied nationwide and carried for many years prior to privatisation!!

Weekdays they do 4, weekends they do 2- so if they remain attached to the set until the last day that's about 106 runs. Let's count the Midland Pullman set as four runs each time it gets used (an ECS, outward passenger, return passenger, an ECS) it will take that a couple of years to catch up, albeit with wider route coverage. The IC Swallow HST power cars between them would have done over 4 million runs, even the GNER ones would have done about 250,000 runs in their time!

Ah, but have they done "EMR Intercity" branded, heavily weathered ex Virgin East Coast livery Mk3's yet?! The more silly liveries the real railway turns out on HSTs takes us further away from anything useful from Hornby as they continue to "keep up with the Jones's"- and 43274 is as silly as it gets as even 100% utilisation would only see it used for a maximum of 32 days before its withdrawn along with the rest of their fleet.

It's this Bachmann "disease" isn't it- they never seem keen to exploit the mouldings they have (probably whilst bogged down in the 3-6 year backlog). If it was my firm I'd have done the 101s in all sensible liveries by now (which clearly does include NSE) and THEN tooled up for a centre car so I can sell them all over again as three-car packs in the liveries worn by the three car 101's. It was the same story with the 150/2's, a few randomly selected liveries which excluded the one they all wore when new and then forget about that moulding and move onto something else!!

Reviving a Class 101s-in-service era topic; was there ONLY ever a double the price, all whistles and bells NSE livery Class 101 from Bachmann or is there a non digital sound, no passengers on board version to be found out there?

Edit- EMR are turning 43274 out in their insipid "aubergine" livery for its final four weeks of existence so I'd like to change my prediction of Hornby's 2022 release to that boxed up with current style 43102, along with the "Staycation" LSL livery...

Take it you didn't get as far as looking through the windows to the insides of the TS vehicles in last years diabolical IC Swallow rake then! As was documented at the time it was a horlicks of a rake anyway; the numbers were right for 1990/early 1991 but that was three years before Central Door Locking was added, by which time that rake was reformed with a 404xx buffet and minus a TF.

I've found I cannot even get a sensibly priced secondhand one for a home respray. I've just resprayed a pair of Lima to make another IC Swallow duo (but have hit a wall with procurement of transfers) because there just isn't another option. There is a gulf between Hornby's supply and the market demand, if they did another Executive pair (logically an ER/ScR pair as the first and only release thus far was a WR pair) and if they did another IC Swallow pair (logically a WR pair as the first and second pairs released were both ER/ScR) and then made their way through the early private liveries they would make a killing, even if 60% of the stock goes to the "keep it in the box" brigade. Next year we can be pretty certain, it will be a green and white LSL "Staycation Express" pair and 43102 as it is now, possibly packaged up with 43238 or 43274 in all-over red. Hornby are only interested in current liveries.

They probably could do, but I very much doubt they would be allowed to spend any money on the "classic" WCML as the budget will have been sunk on HS2 and the attitude will be that we don't need two quick routes from Euston to the Midlands. Not quite a "concorde" moment but I think we currently have the fastest ever London-Rugby and London-Coventry trains and will never again have sub 60 minute runs on the latter. Either way (and neatly landing back on the original topic) the Class 390's will have a 30 year plus service life, just like 91023/132 did. We have become conditioned to screwing more than 40 years out of our frontline InterCity stock because the HST was so good for so long leading to abnormally high expectations and vehicles surpassing the 10,000,000 mile mark.

I think the Pendo fleet will reach "full life"- the chances of HS2 opening on time based on the CrossRail fiasco are zero, and even when HS2 does open you have to break it to people from Coventry and Rugby that their services are being slowed down to the sort of speeds the vans and Mk3's were capable of in the 1970's albeit with better acceleration. It was always the problem the WCML had, it needed a bold solution and nobody can deny that 140mph tilting 390's on advanced signalling was as bold as it was ever going to get in the UK without the massive cost of new route. So the project was totally scoped with the assumption that anything fast would tilt and the line speeds for non tilt remained restrictive. What we are now facing is years and years of upheaval, or having to tolerate slowed down services to go from that 'tilt assumption' to line speed improvements for non-tilters just to stand still on overall journey times on the northern sections.

The smarter move (based on pre-plague loadings) would be to refurbish and reform the 222 fleet into a load of 8 cars (abandoning some of the driving cars) with just one or 1.5 first class coaches and use these to form the hourly Edinburgh-Leeds-Birmingham-Plymouth spine which would release fleet to join up with each other and make the hourly Manchester-Birmingham-Reading-Bournemouth spine into double set 8 cars and/or release 4 cars to work Cardiff-Nottingham in place of the dire 170's. Sadly we are well past the point where adding an extra pantograph coach into the existing 220/221 becomes viable as they are now beyond half way through their lives so the high cost of adding roof mounted power cables linking the cars just couldn't be justified, pity they didn't think of it before they were ordered as being electric motored it would have been ideal and the amount of under the wires running on XC was even greater back then as WCML Birmingham-Scotland would also have benefitted.

That sort of assumes stealth closure of the "classic" WCML to express passenger traffic!! The trouble is that WCML=Pendos and Pendos=WCML, you can't viably run one without the other and it would take a creative work with the numbers to justify a new build of tilting EMUs and/or a politically suicidal decision to slow down the services to places not reached by HS2, which by then will probably include everywhere that isn't called Birmingham...

Bi-mode actually makes quite a lot of sense for XC given the amount of time spent under the wires combined with the fact we are a long way off electrifying everywhere they go. Take the plague out of the equation and I'd have expected a new XC franchise to be let based on killing some/all of the 170's and all the HSTs and having a Voyager-only fleet using cascade from EMR and West Coast, and for a total fleet replacement to be kicked down the road into the 2030's.

The 442's probably had some PRM exemption because of the unshiftable narrow door layout, which may not have transferred along with the units to another role. As others have said, Mk4's are the same length, good for TDM and good for 125mph and only about 12 of them now have future homes, so what chance for the piggies with the middle coach knocked out?

Standard fayre on Bournemouth/Weymouth trains now is 444's which are 2+2 seated, mostly at airlines with doorways in vestibules at the coach ends, they are not bad when compared to a lot of stuff out there but they are a step down from the piggies. They do sometimes use 450's which are 2+3 outer-urbans with doors at 1/3rd and 2/3rd of coach length, and they really are a step down...

Can anyone identify what Class of DMU is that on the St Ives branch? On the later video of a two car (this one is obviously a five car as its a summer Saturday as evidenced by the WCML DVT rake) there is a 101 car coupled to something else, but this looks like 5 cars from the same type.

Legacy of the First Group mission to get rid of guards at any cost; the 458's are not able to work DOO so they get binned along with the 707s to give a standard fleet on the Windsor and suburban lines. The 458s are, however, very reliable modern trains- you'd like to think it would be easier to keep them as 5 cars given the 444's on the same lines are already five cars but you never know...

Not really, it was ludicrous to waste all that money on them to begin with given they are very non-standard, and that (pre plague) London North Western were off-leasing some 350's when their Bombardier junk shows up and they could have easily swapped around to make the dual voltage 350/1's into additional units for SWR giving them total compatibility with existing 444 and 450 if they had wanted extra trains. Doing anything else to the piggies now would be throwing good money after bad, and as now they are no longer needed they are the obvious trains to bin off.

I agree, there would have been enough people willing to pay £244 for a power car (now we know a dummy car on it's own is RRP £70!) even without obvious/significant prototypical features but I'm happy to leave them to it- more fool them! In my humble opinion the Midland Pullman is, and remains, a silly extravagance for 99.9999% of model railways as it's based on a train that ran once in 2020 and has yet to turn a wheel in 2021, and even when "normality" returns will be a once yearly event at many locations and unheard of at very many more. A Swallow livery HST however.....

Unlucky, surely? I seem to recall that as the heavy general program was underway it took the slot of another loco in the sequence and once examination found the Heck damage to be easily fixable they got on with it. If I remember rightly not one other vehicle from Heck ran again, not even the TOE.

Sending it to a works* for them to strip down and then scrapping it is muchos expensive, and given the total demand for Class 91's in the UK is now zero and will be very, very close to zero when the export market works out that a loco geared for 140mph passenger work but takes miles and miles to reach that speed isn't that useful. The ROSCO will always maximise the income from its asset, they are not in the business of chucking money away. * For Class 91's "a works" equals Doncaster, Doncaster or Doncaster as no other site has seen one since they were built, so you pay what they want or don't get the job done!