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phil-b259

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Everything posted by phil-b259

  1. Drax are a power generation company not a toy manufacturer and there are a lot cheaper ways to create advertising than commissioning toy trains (as they would see them) - particularly as consumers cannot by energy directly from Drax in the first place. Besides with this controversy https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68381160 hanging over them keeping a low profile as far as the public is probably a good thing right now.
  2. The only way I could see the ‘free’ Trunk system working (without customers effectively paying rent on the space used to store goods before dispatch) is if it was strictly time limited - and by that we are talking a matter of a couple of weeks rather than months. As for shipping options and dealing with customs / VAT in house - that’s a lot of extra hassle and cost for a retailer to deal with - yet the whole reason why buyers want it is to reduce what they have to pay….. Sorry that’s not how it works - you want the retailer to do more then you are going to have to pay for it through higher, not lower prices….
  3. costly for who whom? E-bay might well be more expensive for you as a buyer, but for a business owner it actually makes lots of sense because all the hard work and cost of keeping the sales platform secure / up to date in presentation terms is dealt with by someone else. Don’t underestimate the work required to provide a reliable and slick online looking sales portal….
  4. That’s what I’m hoping for its more than a little annoying Dapol haven’t provided any images of decorated samples - in contrast to the 1st batch.
  5. https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/st-pancrass-station-planning-for-more-international-passengers-70852/?fbclid=IwAR10umYmZp5LmrC_cmlBC5G7XVTBmRJO-o1LUjJUa9LsuTVtdoVE9RcZfX4_aem_AYNDH2Vv6EUnECcLd8V022p9NyoWI7j7qOVd7zZ8ag74QXjvNaJPu1xpG74jw13HN48 It will be interesting to see what the bidders for this come up with…..
  6. The last time they did that it resulted in severe flooding up the Cuckmete valley inland (driving along the A259 was more like going across a causeway across a lake) with many of the fields and important marsh environments ruined by being left underwater for months as insufficient water was flowing out into the sea due to the build up of shingle across the river mouth. There was much anger and objection to this turn of events - with many people rightly sending that the environment agency’s motives had nothing to do with ‘letting nature take its course’ and everything to do with saving money!
  7. IIRC the tooling for these is an actually owned by Drax (as they paid for it) and not Hornby (whose involvement was just to produce the design and then deliver the models). If so, Hornby themselves cannot simply undertake a further release off their own initiative - they need express permission from Drax to do so. Moreover I’m anlso pretty sure that Drax themselves would want a cut of the profits from the sales of each wagon too! That in turn pushes the RRP even higher and it could be that the price the wagons would have to be sold at is so expensive Hornby believe they won’t sell.
  8. Indeed Far too many folk fail to appreciate that the biggest cost for pretty much all RTR model railway stuff is the amount of assembly required - NOT the cost of the parts themselves. So if you have a basic wagon which is made up of say two injection moulded parts which simply need clipping together, wheels and couplings added but has a top notch paint job with lots of Tampo printing then yes, removing the decoration will make a big difference to the amount of assembly time needed and thus the cost of production and would in theory allow for a lower RRP. However if your wagon is made up of many parts and requires lots of separately fitted detail then the simply omitting the Tampo printing won't actually shorten the assembly time that much and as such any cost savings that do result will be tiny - and that translates into only a small reduction in RRP. Rapidos wagons are very much in the 'high detail with lots of separate fitted parts' category so I would say anyone who thinks there is scope for them to be offered unpainted with a significant price reduction is very deluded.
  9. That is true - but you have to ask was it a wise trade off.... Particularly as there is a fair amount of late 1980s BR stock which could have been refurbished (and achieved much the same effect) rather than replaced (the 321s for example....)
  10. The Bachmann SDJR liveried 7F is a model of the actual preserved loco - which has long carried Prussian Blue and naturally still has its small boiler in preservation. It never was intended to be an accurate model of the loco as it existed during the S&DJRs lifetime. Similarly the S&DJR 4F loco was never intended to be a 100% accurate rendition of the real thing! It was a special release done for the Bachmann collectors club taking advantage of the fondness many folk have for the S&DJR and its existence is in essence no different from why Hornby put their tender drive 4F in S&DJR livery a decades or so beforehand.
  11. But I bet they don't have any army of laywers ready to sue everybody nor a criminal prosecution service which would eagerly throw people in prison if a train came off the track due to floodwater displacing the ballast or undermining an embankment etc. That is the biggest difference (because the derailment risks associated with running trains through floodwater don't change wherever you are on the globe) - while meaning no disrespect in places like Thailand they are still effectively stuck in the Victorian era with respect to how the legal system works with 'risks' and 'hazards' enforcement.
  12. So we are all supposed to shut up about the fact that the 'controlling mind' - which could have easily prevented 90% of the things folk have been moaning about (seating quality, types of couplers, types of bogie, trains ordered then binned after a couple of years use, etc) was deliberately smashed into so many pieces solely for party political / ideological reasons. Even after 30 years I have no intention of letting the Politicians (or the party which did it) off the hook for that action! Pick your saying- "Old Sins have long shadows", "you reap what you sow" the bottom line is that the majority of the railways woes can be traced directly due to its privatisation - and specifically the manor of its privatisation in 1994 whose overarching goal seems to have been to smash it into so many bits it would be impossible to put it back together again in 1994!
  13. Well if you know how Capitalism works why exact did you feel the need to question why firms 'innovate'? Its hardly rocket science to realise that making money is far more important than anything else...Thats why in any capitalist society strong regulation and informed customers who can spot unnecessary 'innovation' is needed. As regards UK railways We used to have such an entity which ticked both those boxes - it was called the British Railways Board! However for purely ideological reasons that was dismantled - and one of the claims made by the Government (a claim still trotted out by ministers when they offload state responsibilities to the private sector is that Government bodies are not innovative enough! In other words stop whinging about business doing what business do and focus on the real nub of the problem - namely the Politicians and in particular the party who the privatised the railways for ideological / party political reasons back in 1994 which ripped the backbone out of the industry and left it fatally exposed to the worst of capitalism!
  14. You miss the point - water doesn't naturally flow uphill! If a system of dykes etc is used to keep water out and sluices let it in then the land itself is meant to flood by virtues of it elevation with respect to nearby watercourses! Its elevation (and other geological attributes) will have been put in place long before man, let alone the Victorians arrived to mess round with it. Unless the Victorians went about the business of celibately removing huge quantities of soil to lower that elevation then Water Medows are NOT a man made feature - all humans have done is to manage that landscape to their advantage.
  15. That is not in doubt but quite frankly those enhancements (they aren't renewals if they actually increase capacity - a renewal would be a like for like with no enhancements to throughput) are too few in number. Ever heard of "closing the gate after the horse has bolted"? - becaus thats what is going on here - too little is being done to expand the drainage provision too late! Throughout the 80s, 90s and 2000s the powers that be sat back and did nothing to expand the system and eek out every ounce of 'overcapacity' that the Victorians built into their systems, preferring to sweat the assets and syphon off money for dividends or simply not spend as much as was needed to keep up with population growth while at the same time ignoring the early warning signs scientists were highlighting about man made climate change.
  16. Don't talk nonsense! Water meadows were not created / designed by Victorians - they are a consequence of geology, hydrology and the sculpting of the landscape by ice ages etc. Whilst its true that Victorians generally did not build houses on water Medows that is largely because the technology to do so was in its infancy and the need to do so was not perceived to be there as it was considered quite acceptable for poor people to live in slum housing
  17. This is an important point which must not be overlooked! Back in BR days High speed trains were all of the dedicated locomotive and free wheeling passenger cars (even when in a fixed formation like the HST sets. These days with the move to hybrid technology and a desire to maximise train flexibility / passenger usage high speed trains are all of the multiple unit type with at least 50% or more of the bogies under the passenger accommodation being driven by traction motors.
  18. The motivation of train builders are, unsurprisingly to provide maximum financial return to their shareholders. You don't do this by sitting back and simply offer the same old thing time after time - just as in the world of model railways, mobile phones, cars or just about any other facet of life if you offer 'something new' on each product line you can charge your consumers more. As such its down to the consumer to know what they are doing - why do you think Apple still churn out new i-phones every year with seemingly very little difference between each model? answer, because there are enough 'I must have the latest' consumers out there willing to buy the things.... Under British Rail, the procurement process tended to be driven by people who only had limited money to spend and understood their product requirements very well indeed and thus tended not to be blindsided by 'innovations' and focused on the more boring, yet arguably more essential aspects of train design. Under privatisation train procurement is driven by a combination of franchise owners and DfT mandarins - neither of whom have much clue about railway engineering and are therefore easily taken advantage off by manufacturers looking to keep shareholder returns high
  19. Actually it does! The laws of physics apply just as much to railway infrastructure as elsewhere and if a drainage pipe is of a certain diameter there is a physical limit to how much water can flow through it. Granted a poorly maintained drainage system will be compromised in its ability top pass liquid but even the most expertly maintained system won't cope if the quantity of liquid presented to it exceeds its capacity. Thats why we have so many raw sewage discharges - its not so much that the existing sewer system is intrinsically badly maintained - it more the case that population growth, changes in land use and the increasingly large volumes of water dumped by weather systems in short periods of time* is simply too much for the inherited network to cope with! Fixing that requires money to be spent on NEW drainage / sewers (which is of course the reason why it hasn't happened on anything like the scale needed). *The statistics are quite clear - although the quantity of rain over a year or the number of 'rainy days' may not have changed much the volume of water being dumped at any given time increasing. I very much doubt that is the case historically - designing for 'one in XXXX years wasn't something the Victorians did. They simply accepted that things would flood occasionally. They simply built drainage systems to cope with what they perceived as average rainfall and never expected it to cope with prolonged downpours. There was certainly no need to produce the in depth environmental reports and studies where such things are duly considered by the modern planning process before they started building things. Certainly I have yet to be shown a Victorian 'balancing pond' or land set aside to deliberately flood at times of heavy rain - both features which are seen alongside many developments / roads built over the past 40 years.
  20. Good to know its a consideration. I have said before I cannot justify shelling out for packs of three when I only want one of that livery. Also, have you considered a 'selection box' approach? - a set of 3 Southern Railway vans say but with each featuring a different livery. After all I doubt every single van was repainted overnight in 1936 and a mix of liveries in a rake is probably very prototypical.
  21. These sites may be useful. https://www.flickr.com/photos/67418519@N00/galleries/72157649234607727/with/4375316039 https://www.flickr.com/photos/67418519@N00/galleries/72157649679427882/ https://sremg.org.uk/coach/coupe/coupe_se13.pdf Please be aware that although initially trains tended to be 'all Pullman' as time went on you increasingly got the situation where there were only a handful of Pullman cars attached to a train of otherwise ordinary M1 / Mk2 stock as seen here What livery are the cars you are looking to purchase in?
  22. I fully understand that my suggestions are just lines drawn on satellite imagery - but they also debunk the myth that replacing any of the crossings by bridges will always be intrusive to the community / require demolition etc. Ridgemont should have gone ages ago what with the flyover right next door. Bow Bricknall, Milbrook, Stewartby, Kempson Hardwick and Broadmead Lane are all easily bridgeable and in reality there are no serious grounds in terms of 'intrusion' etc to oppose these other than NIMBYs wanting to flex their muscles. Appley Guise and Liddington do present problems in that to avoid intrusiveness then replacement road vehicle bridges would have to be some distance away from the current crossing point to prevent visual intrusion / demolition - plus there is that danger that the associated new roads etc could lead to unwanted housing development. There is also the question if those new roads should be the railways responsibility to fund given they would to some degree also act as by-passes for the villages, plus the sheer quantity of new roads means it wopuld most likely torpedo the BCR from an aciuntants perspective. Woburn Sands is particularly difficult as there isn't an easy way top create a bypass road so in this case the crossing would most likely have to stay. Fenny Startford requires the adaptation of the road network in the area to divert road traffic over the existing bridge to the west and the requisitioning of what may be private roads on an industrial estate so is legally complex.
  23. Why the obsession with replicating vehicle crossings at exactly the same place as the level crossing is currently located. One of the advantages of motor vehicles is they travel faster than people can walk so there is absolutely no reason whatsoever why they cannot be diverted some distance away from the crossing site to get over the railway without world ending! Its a different matter for pedestrians - but footbridges are generally smaller and easier to fit into constrained locations, particularly if you shut the road!
  24. Actually its not as bad as you are trying to claim! Firstly several of the crossings are more or less in open country / have no settlement around them (Stewartby, Kempston Hardwick, Milbrook etc) Secondly options exist in some locations to provide bridges away from the current crossing sites for motor vehicles (which could also help remove traffic from the centre of the settlements. Thirdly in some cases alternative routes for motor vehicles that bridge the railway already exist (albut with some minor alterations needed to the road network). Granted there are a couple of tricky spots - Woburn Sands being the biggest one where there doesn't look to be any easy way to by-pass the crossing area with new roads and in that case a overbridge could well be said to be intrusive - BUT if the majority of the other crossings were got rid of then having one crossing on the whole line would not cause that much of a problem. But take a look at these - and by the way I would love to know just how you can claim that bridges at the likes of Broadmead Road are going to be hideously intrusive when there isn't a single property anywhere near it!
  25. A fundamentally rural landscape indicates that settlements are:- (1) surrounded by fields, farms woodlands etc (2) The settlements themselves are discrete entities and not overly large. A fundamental rural landscape does not mean a absence of settlement - the Majority of North Yorkshire, Somerset, Cumbria or indeed Bedfordshire comfortably fits into the 'fundamentally rural' category A fundamentally urban area would be indicated by (1) Settlements merging into one another with no disconsiderable break between them (2) An absence of agriculture or woodlands (3) Green spaces being things like parks or Graveyards, etc Go and have a look at Satellite mapping and compare Wandsworth- Feltham with Blectchley - Bedford and the difference is obvious!
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