'Genesis' 4 & 6 wheel coaches in OO Gauge - New Announcement

[ossy5190]

A very interesting move. They might not satisfy the purists but if they can increase interest in the pre-grouping scene that can only be a good thing. Good to hear that Hattons are prepared to listen to feedback at this early stage regarding the full brake.

 

Looks like the 4 wheelers and the 6 wheel first would all make pretty reasonable models of Caledonian vehicles. There could also be the potential to 'bash' the equivalent 6 compartment 6 wheel third. Can't wait to see more detailed images.

[Miss Prism]

1 hour ago, 34theletterbetweenB&D said:

That's a good expression. Attention to details such as differences in compartment lengths by class, and the reduced panel width between the last quarter light and the coach end, will make a significant difference to the overall impression the vehicles give.

 

I've had a quickie bash at improving the compartment spacings of the 4-wheel 3rd. which at least provides for a viable partition thickness:

 

 

I've also removed the torpedo vents - a bit too innovative for 1880 stock, especially when pointing in the wrong direction.

 

Some decent shackles for the springs would improve matters, or even some J-hangers!

 

A vacuum cylinder (rather than the Westinghouse) would increase the generic-ness.

 

I'll leave you to decide how five compartments can share two oil lamps....

 

Edited October 9, 2019 by Miss Prism

[HonestTom]

I was surprised at the announcement of generics, but given the feedback, I don't think that's going to harm sales much. Certainly I'm sorely tempted by several of them.

 

I get that a lot of people would prefer more specific models, but my counter-argument is price. Consider the cost of tooling a specific range of coaches for a particular company. Most pre-Grouping coaches didn't last into the BR era and many didn't even last long in Big Four service. There would typically be many variations. Most of the pre-Grouping companies have a handful of locomotives available, if that. Sales volumes would be low, and the additional cost of research and development would mean that prices would necessarily have to be high.

 

And even then you're bound to have someone complaining because that particular batch of coaches had the steps in a different position and therefore it's totally unsuitable for the Morstemwo and St Bithel's branch, why oh why etc etc. And if you produce coaches accurate for one company in many different liveries, you're still going to get complaints from everyone whose favourite company wasn't chosen, and perhaps fewer sales because the "generic" coach now costs £70 instead of £30.

 

This gives people an affordable way to get a rake that looks about right for many different companies, even if it isn't totally accurate. There's nothing stopping people from making more accurate coaches if that's what they want, but for the rest of us it means that we have something we can run behind our newly-acquired Cs, N7s or 1Ps.

 

I wonder if the lack of LBSC coaches is anything to do with Bachmann introducing the Thomas range, with its LBSC-based Red Coaches?

[JohnR]

2 hours ago, PaulRhB said:

As noted several times the market for one style is very limited and therefore not viable, that’s why Modelrail didn’t do the matching W&U coach for the J70. While a GWR version or a SR IoW one might have broken even it wouldn’t have sold the numbers these hopefully will and I very much doubt we’d have seen LNWR, L&Y & Metropolitan that I’ll buy a few of each. Fact is I’ll only buy a few in two of those liveries but 2-3 of sets in LNWR so that kinda supports the viability notes as even in LNWR I’m only buying the equivalent of a full mainline set of bogie coaches. 

 

Not only that, but consider the price point. I suspect they can be offered at £30 because they will be producing A LOT of them. Make them a single style or prototype, and the numbers will fall dramatically. Increasing the price. Which probably reduces the number still further. 

[Edwardian]

43 minutes ago, Joseph_Pestell said:

Just checked the original pics from Hatton's.

 

There are both 6w lavatory vehicles (no doors) and 6w vehicles with 4 passenger compartments and a luggage compartment. But the latter don't seem to be on the price list/order form.

 

You're not wrong, there.  The GNR and LNWR versions have door handles.  The GNR one is labelled "LUGGAGE" at the waist,  The LNWR seems to have a grey chalk-board panel. 

[Steamport Southport]

45 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

 

The only thing the Hornby model has in common with the S&DJR coach is that it has 3-compartments.  As I said, 3-compt. coaches were hardly typical of the period of the paneling Hornby has attempted to represent.

 

The proportions are obviously different, as is the roof radius, quite apart from the detail.  To say this is a model of the S&DJR coach is like saying a Labrador is a Dachshund because they both have 4 legs and a tail!

 

Link

 

And these from Hattons are any more accurate? I did point out the era they were made.

 

But for someone who uses photoshop to criticise every model as being inaccurate (apart from one for some reason) you are surprisingly being very lenient towards these....

 

 

 

Jason

[Compound2632]

53 minutes ago, Steamport Southport said:

 

Erm. It was a Somerset & Dorset design. The drawings were in Model Railways in the 1970s. So it's probably more accurate than these with a few compromises for the era.

 

 

Re. the Hornby 4-wheeler. Its "inspiration" is a S&DJR 3-compartment first No. 2A, illustrated in R. Garner, The Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway Locomotive and Rolling Stock Registers 1886-1930 (Somerset and Dorset Railway Trust, 2000), p. 16, and elsewhere. Similar carriages, a 3-compartment first No. 1 and a 4-compartment third No. 6, are illustrated in C.G. Maggs, Highbridge in its heyday (Oakwood Press, 2nd edition 1986), plates 55 and 56. These carriages have an unusual panelling style. The waist and eves panels, together with the panels between the windows, have half-round beading - not unlike the beading applied to the waist and lower panels in the GNR / ECJS / LNER style, and also that MS&LR carriage we saw earlier, but with rounded corners. I've not seen this style anywhere else than these S&DJR carriages. Little seems to be known of them - whether they date from days of the independent S&DR or after the formation of the joint committee; whether built at Highbridge or by contractors, etc. 

 

The Hornby model has a rather crude representation of this panelling and also applies it to the lower panel. The carriage also sits on a crude and ancient underframe which has been shared with some other models. Its most glaring defect is that it sticks to the ancient Triang 2 mm too high buffer height. It makes a satisfactory toy but could hardly be said to be a more accurate representation of a S&DJR carriage than any of the Genesis carriages.

 

 

[PatB]

Ahh, RMWeb doing what it does best. 

 

Something that I've found, since starting my own business, is just how many experts there are in my field willing, indeed eager, to offer advice on what I should be doing. I find it strange that almost none of them operate what would clearly be a far more successful rival operation. 

 

Funny old world, ain't it? 

[Wickham Green]

28 minutes ago, Miss Prism said:

 

 

I'll leave you to decide how five compartments can share two oil lamps....

 

Easy - low back seats without a full partition .......... nothing unusual in the four-wheeler era - but I've no idea if that's what Hattons had in mind.

[Edwardian]

18 minutes ago, Steamport Southport said:

 

And these from Hattons are any more accurate? I did point out the era they were made.

 

But for someone who uses photoshop to criticise every model as being inaccurate (apart from one for some reason) you are surprisingly being very lenient towards these....

 

 

 

Jason

 

Sorry, I think you have not quite grasped my point.

 

Neither the execrable Hornby 4-wheelers nor the new Hattons coaches represent accurate models of specific prototypes.

 

However, the Hattons coaches appear prototypical, i.e. they actually reasonably represent the appearance of coaches of that era.  The Hornby coach is not prototypical.  It is not realistic in any way and does not represent at all accurately how coaches of the period looked. 

 

If you don't want a nice model of a generic coach because it does not match any specific prototype, fair enough, though it might be fair to add that, given the economics of production and the current evolution of the market, I suspect your RTR choice for this era is a generic coach or nothing.

 

To dismiss these coaches, as one contributor sought to do, as no better than the Hornby 4-wheelers, seems to me to be wildly unfair and to display a lamentable lack of discrimination!

 

BTW, I don't use Photoshop for the purpose you suggest. My points in relation to these models, and I have had several, are based on the extent to which they represent generic features of coaches of the period depicted. Naturally the scope for such comments is relatively limited, and I think Hattons have done a very reasonable job in relation to their stated objectives. 

 

EDIT: As to the era, that explains some of the crudeness, but certainly not the solecisms of the Hornby design, and consider the Triang clerestory, a far superior body for a generic panelled coach, which is why it has been justly beloved of bashers and bodgers over the years, whereas the Hornby 4-wheeler is best forgotten.  

 

 

Edited October 9, 2019 by Edwardian

[Nick C]

35 minutes ago, Miss Prism said:

 

I've had a quickie bash at improving the compartment spacings of the 4-wheel 3rd. which at least provides for a viable partition thickness:

 

 

I've also removed the torpedo vents - a bit too innovative for 1880 stock, especially when pointing in the wrong direction.

 

Some decent shackles for the springs would improve matters, or even some J-hangers!

 

A vacuum cylinder (rather than the Westinghouse) would increase the generic-ness.

 

I'll leave you to decide how five compartments can share two oil lamps....

 

Many third class coaches of that era didn't have full height partitions, and so would have had fewer lamps than compartments - see the Stroudley BT 949 on the Bluebell which has just one lamp for three passenger compatments as an example. It also has unpadded wooden seats...

[JohnR]

This is a bit like the thread on "better looking OO gauge track". There was a vocal minority who seemed to decry it because OO is underscale, and if anyone wanted something better were happy to tell people to change to EM or P4. 

[Dunsignalling]

4 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

But to my mind none of these excellent arguments in favour of the generic carriage idea is an argument against making them accurate for one pre-Grouping company, rather than none. What are the small, pretty pre-Grouping passenger engines on offer at the moment? Principally from the southern lines, which narrows the field somewhat.

It doesn't really because, for the most part, the Southern Railway (and to an only slightly lesser extent, BR Southern Region) continued more-or-less as its separate constituents with relatively little intermingling of locos or stock. Wherever you went, the green paint would often have been all that had changed from what had gone before. 

 

One (Hatton's in this context) is therefore left with a choice, do you offer separate ranges of accurate LSWR, LBSCR and SECR coaches, for which you would inevitably have to charge much more, and perhaps not sell enough of each to make any return? Or, make a generic range and offer it in all three different liveries to spread the risk.

 

If one chooses the latter, there's no point in limiting the range to areas south of the Thames, and that's what Hatton's have gone for. Most who see them won't know (or alternatively won't care), they'll just be "nice coaches" in a livery that will go with their loco. Even the more savvy of us probably couldn't tell generic from accurate on coaches purporting to originate other than from "their" railway company.

 

The problem with pre-group r-t-r in general is that the more railway companies exist, the greater the breadth of choice you have, and (in general) the smaller the number of devotees each will attract. If you cater for the Big Four, potentially 25% of modellers of that period will follow each, if you cover twenty-five pre-1923 companies, that figure drops to 4% each.   

 

We are being offered a product that some will like and others won't. Those who find it unacceptable are perfectly at liberty to wait for what they really want. I personally consider it would be a very long one but, ironically, this development might actually make it shorter than it might otherwise be. 

 

Me? I intend to pragmatically throw some cash Hatton's way but, if something more appropriate does come along later, I can upgrade. I don't think I'll be holding my breath, though.... 

 

John

[Dominion]

@Hattons Dave  Has the design determined yet if the roof will be integral with the bodies or might it be a separate component ?

Also, excellent that you will look at doing Full brakes. I would buy at least three from the first batch liveries if you do them.  Good luck.

[Legend]

1 hour ago, Steamport Southport said:

 

And these from Hattons are any more accurate? I did point out the era they were made.

 

But for someone who uses photoshop to criticise every model as being inaccurate (apart from one for some reason) you are surprisingly being very lenient towards these....

 

 

 

Jason

 

I get the point that as they are generic they cant be accurate , so in that respect they aren't any more accurate than Hornbys S&DJR 3 compartment coach . So that is true .  But these models are chalk and cheese from the Hornby bolt a cheap carriage molding onto a brake van model.  They do at least look the part , which of course the Hornby one fails to do, even as Annie and Clarabel!   So I think its a bit unfair to categorise them the same way 

[Compound2632]

1 minute ago, Paul.Uni said:

More likely that a thought that Dapol may shrink their O gauge LB&SCR carriages into OO.

 

But both the Bachmann Thomas and Dapol O gauge carriages are based on Stroudley 4-wheelers; the Hattons carriages could pass for Billinton carriages - and very smart they would look in umber and cream. In fact, there's three livery options: mahogany, umber and cream, and umber - the umber and cream overlapping with either the mahogany and engines in IEG, or with the all-over umber and engines in umber. Brighton modellers (who have always had it good) will never have had it as good!

[newbryford]

At least they aren't doing a Network Rail version...……………...

 

[Wickham Green]

27 minutes ago, Dunsignalling said:

........ The problem with pre-group r-t-r in general is that the more railway companies exist, the greater the breadth of choice you have, ........................

Largely true - but Hattons could have based their models on, say, a 'typical' Gloster styling or a 'typical' Brown Marshall product and they'd have been reasonably accurate for a number of different companies who bought such vehicles ............. but they've chosen to reinvent the wheel instead.

[Vistisen]

On 08/10/2019 at 13:20, Compound2632 said:

 

Well, that's the dilemma in a nutshell - you can't be one without the other...

Known in the army as "one size doesn't quite fit anyone" I believe it was in Spike Milligan's epic war memories

[BillH]

6 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

That is an interesting carriage, whose origins I am struggling to identify. Round-cornered eves panels, windows round-cornered at the top, square cornered at the bottom, then GNR / LNER-style square-cornered beading on the waist and lower panels. Have the lower panels been replaced when the carriage was converted to a camping coach, along with some of the doors being sealed up?

 

5 hours ago, 31A said:

 

Ex MS&LR (GCR) I believe.  From the pictures and drawings in George Dow's "Great Central" (vol. 2) the MS&LR had coaches with square cornered lower panelling, and the round topped axle boxes point towards the GC as well.  Can't see whether the camping coach is 4 or 6 wheeled, but it looks quite similar to the MS&L 6 wheeled 5 compartment 3rds built 1879-1899 in the drawing on Appendix IX of the above book.

 

4 hours ago, PhilJ W said:

Its been mentioned about the beading being not right for a particular company. Perhaps Hattons might consider a version without beading. Theres plenty of after market suppliers who will be able to supply laser cut or etched beading.Theres no doubt many will be repainted into liveries that have not been proposed/announced as well as some fictional liveries. 

IIRC the early LNER camping coaches were ex GNR ECJS dating from the 1880's. They had lower, flatter roofs than later stock. A 'lower roof' variant might be worthy of consideration by Hattons as it could also be used as a basis for a clerestory version.

 

3 hours ago, JohnR said:

A request for @Hattons Dave- Have you thought about doing a version in a Camping Coach livery?

 

Here is another more picture of what I presume to be the same camping coach at Brightlingsea in 1936

 

https://www.gettyimages.ca/detail/news-photo/bank-holiday-in-a-camping-coach-nearly-500-camping-coaches-news-photo/1053856492

and a train of them at Loughton where students from Scotland are staying during a trip to London in 1937.

 

https://www.gettyimages.com.au/detail/news-photo/college-boys-camping-coach-coronation-holiday-42-boys-with-news-photo/1053856470

 

they look similar in style to the one which features on the poster, although that is clearly an ex- brake coach.

 

 

 

 

[friscopete]

They are going to look great and accuracy is in the knowledge of the beholder .Why did they make these when I want an Southern Pacific S6  switcher ? I mean the fact they will please thousands is irrelevant when its not what I want .So disregard the snorters and sniffers and lets look forward some great looking trains which is why most will buy them ,including me .

[Vistisen]

20 minutes ago, Legend said:

 

I get the point that as they are generic they cant be accurate , so in that respect they aren't any more accurate than Hornbys S&DJR 3 compartment coach . So that is true .  But these models are chalk and cheese from the Hornby bolt a cheap carriage molding onto a brake van model.  They do at least look the part , which of course the Hornby one fails to do, even as Annie and Clarabel!   So I think its a bit unfair to categorise them the same way 

Expectations are pretty high based on a few cgi renders. I also expect them to be a step up in quality. But to say chalk and cheese is under a tad over the top, at best at the moment it is ' plastic and pixel'!

[Compound2632]

10 minutes ago, friscopete said:

They are going to look great and accuracy is in the knowledge of the beholder 

 

But for what they are, why not make them as good as possible? For your £30-odd, would you rather have a good generic carriage or a very good generic carriage?

[JohnR]

15 minutes ago, BillH said:

 

 

 

 

Here is another more picture of what I presume to be the same camping coach at Brightlingsea in 1936

 

https://www.gettyimages.ca/detail/news-photo/bank-holiday-in-a-camping-coach-nearly-500-camping-coaches-news-photo/1053856492

and a train of them at Loughton where students from Scotland are staying during a trip to London in 1937.

 

https://www.gettyimages.com.au/detail/news-photo/college-boys-camping-coach-coronation-holiday-42-boys-with-news-photo/1053856470

 

they look similar in style to the one which features on the poster, although that is clearly an ex- brake coach.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is the sort of thing I had in mind. I leave it to the coach experts to tell me what these were originally.... Camping coaches at East Budleigh in 1948. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[sem34090]

Those look to me like ex-LC&DR coaches, so with different panelling to the Hattons stock. Still, the latter are probably a very reasonable substitute.