MarkSG

Comments upthread, based on the CAD render, suggest it's a Midland style match truck. The Midland Railway, unlike most other companies, did have a standard design of match truck, and there are documented examples of them being used with a Cowans Sheldon crane of the type Oxford are making. See comments on this subject in this related topic: https://www.rmweb.co.uk/forums/topic/148508-crane-match-trucks/ So it is the obvious choice if a match truck is being included, because it will be definitely right for at least some of the versions and "close enough" for many of the others. But if you're not modelling a location which would have seen a Midland crane, and you'd prefer a more accurate match truck for yours, then the included match truck isn't going to be much use for anything else.

It will make a difference to my purchasing habits, although not necessarily buying less overall. With Hattons, if there was a new announcement that I liked the look of then I could pre-order to the trunk, and then as they were released they gradually stacked up until I decided to get them sent to me in one box. It both guaranteed getting the item, with no risk of missing out if it sold out on pre-order, and minimised postage costs. If I queue up pre-orders with any other retailer, though, what will happen is that I'll get a steady stream of single item deliveries, in some cases only a few days apart, each with its own associated postage costs. So I'll end up spending a lot more money for the same number of things. To avoid that, I think I'll probably be less keen to pre-order in the first place. Only big ticket items, such as locos, that I'd be happy to get in a standalone delivery, will be pre-ordered. For wagons, I think I'll switch back to taking my chances on actual release, and hoping that I can time an order to get two or three (or more) recent releases in the same parcel. That does mean I'll be more at risk of missing out on some popular items. But I think that's less of an issue with lower cost items such as wagons - very few of them are going to be "must buy" purchases in the same way as an eagerly anticipated loco. So if I end up having to take my chances on the secondary market, I won't be too bothered, and it won't be the end of the world if nothing turns up at all.

My first was the 1978 show at the same venue. I persuaded my dad to take me! In later years, when I was a bit older, I was allowed to travel down to London on the train on my own.

Interesting. I have to confess that I'd never heard of a Palvan before. I'm not sure whether, realistically, one would have found its way into rural East Anglia very shortly after being built, but I suppose there's a viable Rule 1 scenario whereby one was attached to a regular fruit train simply to make up the numbers. 🙂

I do think that the Bachmann crane was over-engineered for the majority of its customers, yes. But I do also think that having it poseable is useful, because a lot of buyers of cranes are going to want to put them into action scenes rather than having them always in jib-down mode as would be the case in transit. Oxford did manage that with the rail gun, though, without feeling the need to replicate the real life mechanism in the way that Bachmann did with their crane. And I think most people would be satisfied with relatively limited moveability - just being able to lift and rotate the jib is probably enough. So hopefully they can find a suitable compromise between functionality and simplicity.

It's nice to see work in progress at last! I'm not entirely sure whether I really want an included match truck - I was actually looking forward to repurposing a spare three plank wagon for the job. But I suspect they'll sell more with one included, because not everybody will want to do that.

The Trunk system was absolutely brilliant, but I suspect it worked for Hattons because they had plenty of warehouse space and a custom-built online retail system. Rails are using an off-the-shelf online retail system, which is probably a lot cheaper to run but might be difficult to integrate with a Trunk system. And I have a feeling they don't have anywhere near as much storage space as Hattons used to have! So I can understand why they might not be going in that direction. I'd love to be proved wrong, though. The directory, on the other hand, is essentially just a database-driven website that can happily run as a standalone entity with no significant costs other than the staff time involved in keeping it updated. So if they have got the staff availability to run it, then it's easy enough to do.

There's an online version of the article here: https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/life/1876250/model-railways-not-running-out-of-steam It's formatted differently, but the basic content is essentially the same.

The ferry wagon is an interesting choice, and something that I hadn't previously come across. Not on my purchase radar, since it's the wrong era. But I'm still intrigued enough to want to know more. Where would these have been seen, in real life?

I have to admit that colourful PO wagons are one of the reasons I sometimes wish I'd stuck with Big Four rather than switching to early BR 🙂

As someone who asked for precisely that, this is welcome news indeed. The mockups don't really do justice to the real life appearance of a patched BR number over a very weathered and worn wagon, so it will be interesting to see the first decorated samples of these. But I'll definitely be buying a couple.

You can't always get what you want You can't always get what you want You can't always get what you want But if you try, sometimes Well, you might find You get what you need 🙂

There's a video of one of them running on normal OO track on the Hornby Facebook page. Doesn't show them running through points, though. https://www.facebook.com/officialhornby/videos/190086229860554

A strangely dull comment.

Slightly different marketing - the new release has a stated age range of 5+, whereas the original was 3+. That may partly be a way of differentiating the product from the likes of Fisher-Price, which are generally aimed at a younger age bracket. And I suspect it's probably more practical, too - the Playtrains track, while simple enough to assemble, is "proper" railway track, and the trains use flanged wheels to run on the track. That's different to Fisher-Price, which uses grooved track and unflanged wheels, which is less realistic but easier for a toddler to handle. Playtrains seems to me to be better suited to early primary school rather than pre-school children, and I suspect that the new marketing reflects that. Also, the Playtrains page on the Hornby website now talks about a tie-in with Trainmaster, which for those who don't know is a children's train-based activity provider. So I presume that Hornby now see that as a key marketing opportunity for the range; kids will see Playtrains in action at the events and then pester their parents to buy one for them! I'm quite pleased with this, actually. Obviously, Playtrains are of no real interest to adult modellers. But if it keeps the Hornby brand in the minds of children, and provides something that's just a bit of a step up from the Fisher-Price Thomas range, then that's a good thing in the long run.

I was just looking at the event calendar, and noticed that there are some events which seem to be eternal. For example, the Redditch show: Despite the way it's correctly showing the dates in the link above, when you look at it it says "This event began 02/03/24 and repeats every day forever". And on the calendar itself, there are events showing every day, which is clearly implausible. I can't tell if this is caused by the event being incorrectly added to the calendar by the organiser, or whether it's a bug in the calendar itself. But, either way, it could probably do with being fixed!

Sam can obviously speak for himself, but my impression is that he sees trains in much the same way that other modellers see aircraft, or ships, or cars. That is, the model itself is the thing, and there's no need to create a setting in which to display it. And that's an attitude which is common across a lot of modelling disciplines. It's railway modellers who seem to be the odd ones out here, in that we do generally prefer to place our models in a setting. It might be interesting to reflect on why that is.

I think you're getting your authors slightly mixed up there. I suspect you mean JRR Tolkein or JK Rowling. And it could be either, because you could be describing the habitat of both Gollum and goblins. 🙂

I'm not complaining. As I said earlier, anything like this is a gamble. Out of five wagons in the box, two I can definitely use right now, one I have a potential use for later and two that I'm probably never going to use isn't a bad outcome. The RRP of the three that I can use adds up to more than £100, so the other two are essentially freebies. I might offer them to a friend of mine, who does model an era that they'd be suitable for. Or I might free up the space on my shelves by eBaying them. Either way, it's a perfectly acceptable result all round.

Toy (n) * an object for children to play with * an object that is used by an adult for pleasure rather than for serious use Model (n) * a physical object, usually smaller than the real object, that is used to represent something (From https://dictionary.cambridge.org/, irrelevant meanings excluded) Those are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, models are a very common form of toy.

My £100 box arrived this morning. Contents: 2024 BRM calendar, pen, coasters and pin badge. All vaguely useful! Two 8 plank SR open wagons in BR grey (two different numbers). Almost perfect, if it wasn't for the fact that I've already bought one and one of those in the box has the same number. But that's solvable just by applying enough weathering to make the number illegible at normal viewing distance. GWR Toad brake van. Not quite my scene, as it's the wrong era and wrong location for my current project. But I might be able to make some use of it, possibly on a side project. Two OOA wagons, one in Railfreight red/grey and one in Civil Link yellow/grey. These were the ones I didn't really want, as I can't see any likelihood of me using them on a layout in the foreseeable future. So I might see what I can get for them on eBay. Unless anyone here wants to make me an offer for one or both of them. Or, possibly, do a swap for a wagon you don't need but I could use!

No, because that's a plausible fictional scenario. Personally, I think it's still a train set even if it's permanently attached to a baseboard. It's making at least some effort towards real life or fictional plausibility (even if it involves a significant willing suspension of disbelief) which I think is the key. That doesn't have to be a model of an actual railway. It can be completely fictitious. I'd call Laurie Calvert's steampunk layouts model railways, not train sets, because although they're unrelated to the real world they're set in a plausible and consistent alternate universe (and there's a lot of excellent scenic modelling going on there, too). But SamsTrains' setup is a train set. It's a big, expensive train set - the sort we all dreamed about as kids - but it's a train set nonetheless, because it exists solely to run lots of different and unrelated trains on, without any attempt to create a consistent modelled world. That's a good question. Arguably, some of the most famous "train in a landscape" layouts are, functionally, just very big working dioramas, because although the trains pass through the landscape they don't really interact with it at all - there's no shunting, and in some cases there aren't even any stops at stations, instead the trains just run through at a constant speed. But I think it's still a model railway even if nothing is moving, as long as it is a model of a railway. I'd say that a railway diorama is a subset of model railways, rather than being something different.

I think it becomes a model railway as soon as you start making a deliberate effort to recreate something which represents a real (or plausibly fictional) railway, rather than just buying and running whatever takes your fancy.

So Pendon is a just a train set then? Because, despite the detail and fidelity of the modelling, operationally it's just a big roundy-roundy...

You mean, because it turned out not to be a mystery?