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Bachmann 2020 Range


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4 hours ago, woodenhead said:

Is my understanding correct that this year Bachmann have pre-announced that announcements will not be forthcoming on the pre-announced announcements day and they are now announcing announcements without announcement?

Sorry, haven’t got the nounce to untangle all that...

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5 hours ago, classy52 said:

The following would be nice;

1. DB Red and/or Malcolm Rail liveried Class 90 

2. Colas Rail Freight Class 70

3. A new re-run of the ex-Railtrack or a new Network Rail liveried JJA Auto-Ballaster 5 wagon set


I’d love it if the Autoballasters were rerun, especially in NR yellow
However they would cost £50 to £70 a wagon at today’s prices.

 

One of their top dogs said at Ally Pally last year, or maybe it was the previous Warley (2018), that it would be unlikely that most of the complex and highly detailed modern wagons they’ve done over the last decade, would ever see the light of day again.

The reasoning being that the inevitable high prices would put many would be purchasers off and sales volumes wouldn’t justify the outlay. i.e. just too risky.

In my initial enquiry, I mentioned that these and certain other wagons had flown of the shelves and hardly ever appear S/H, but it seems it’s a risk they are not currently prepared to take.

 

Complex and expensive to produce might now be limited to novel and attractive items, such as the crane, that will sell well on a one and only production run.

 

 

Ron

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5 minutes ago, Ron Ron Ron said:


I’d love it if the Autoballasters were rerun, especially in NR yellow
However they would cost £50 to £70 a wagon at today’s prices.

 

One of their top dogs said at Ally Pally last year, or maybe it was the previous Warley (2018), that it would be unlikely that most of the complex and highly detailed modern wagons they’ve done over the last decade, would ever see the light of day again.

The reasoning being that the inevitable high prices would put many would be purchasers off and sales volumes wouldn’t justify the outlay. i.e. just too risky.

In my initial enquiry, I mentioned that these and certain other wagons had flown of the shelves and hardly ever appear S/H, but it seems it’s a risk they are not currently prepared to take.

 

Complex and expensive to produce might now be limited to novel and attractive items, such as the crane, that will sell well on a one and only production run.

 

 

Ron

 

I see your point and interesting to hear what you were informed about from Bachmann themselves at one of the shows but for me personally I would pay £50 - £60 a wagon of the Auto-Ballasters in today's prices & yes in NR Yellow or even in ex-Railtrack, I think they were always between £45 to £55 each when released.

Maybe you or someone else could clarify but if you already have the tooling and have done this before why wouldn't you do it again and charge say less than £60 a wagon especially if it were a very popular release previously because as far as I can remember they came & went in a flash and when I realised they would have been a great addition to my collection they were gone & fetching stupid money on Ebay due to rarity even to this day...yes I still search for them on Ebay but quite fruitless too be honest.

I sometimes just don't understand the mentality especially when the new players such as Accurascale, Revolution, Hatton's & Cavalex can come up with brand new tooled, complex and high fidelity wagons at normal prices so to speak and yes you can argue that Bachmann have more overheads & god knows what else but when you have the tooling already why would you bin it???

I obviously don't know the inner workings at Bachmann or their research dept. thus if they think their best complex wagons will not sell then so be it, I'll just wait for someone else to come along & do them and hopefully it will be the Auto-Ballaster.

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It’s not only having the tooling.

I was told, and it seemed to be a reasonable case, that it was the large number of separate parts and the subsequent assembly costs.

I can’t remember the exact numbers but some of these wagons had over 100 and maybe nearer 200 individual components.

 

I mentioned everything you’ve said about these wagons flying off the shelf and being sold out, in no time at all.

I was also probing him and mentioned the new players on the block that you’ve mentioned.

You are right though, the new players are set up differently and are much leaner and smaller outfits, but it’s also very risky for them.

It’s a different scale of risk for the likes of Bachmann, particularly being an arm of a larger company and no doubt charged with making suitable profits for their parent company.

 

The only hope is that we’re another year later on and Bachmann might start to view things differently.

With the new players continuing with more new announcements and producing actual physical product that is selling, at what many would have considered eye watering prices only a few years ago, there clearly is a market for highly detailed and complex to make, modern wagons.

The question remains......you and I might be happy to pay  £50, £60 or even £70 per wagon, but would Bachmann consider that a big enough market exists at these prices to make it viable for them?

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8 hours ago, Ron Ron Ron said:

p.s.

JJA’s are near the top of my list of wants, along with decent looking JNA Falcons and not the plasticky looking rubbish that Dapol gave us.

More infrastructure wagons and track machines please....someone.......anyone.

 

Yes absolutely I'm the same, I've been trawling for JJA's everywhere on & off for a couple of years now and they are rare as hen's teeth but as far as existing tooling is concerned they are also on top of my list...here's hoping.

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18 hours ago, The Johnster said:

A decent 5-plank open...

At this point I would 'settle' for Hornby issuing the ex-Airfix GMR generic five plank general merchandise open in appropriate post 1936 railway company and BR period liveries...

 

 

9 hours ago, Ron Ron Ron said:

... for the likes of Bachmann, particularly being an arm of a larger company and no doubt charged with making suitable profits for their parent company...

It will be brutal, especially while they are short of manufacturing capacity. What gets the production slots will be whatever yields maximum return to Kader right now, end of.

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15 hours ago, gwrrob said:

 

You can also only flog a willing horse.

But you can always flog big green engines, or so it would seem from the number of them in the manufacturer's catalogues:jester:

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10 hours ago, Ron Ron Ron said:


I’d love it if the Autoballasters were rerun, especially in NR yellow
However they would cost £50 to £70 a wagon at today’s prices.

 

One of their top dogs said at Ally Pally last year, or maybe it was the previous Warley (2018), that it would be unlikely that most of the complex and highly detailed modern wagons they’ve done over the last decade, would ever see the light of day again.

The reasoning being that the inevitable high prices would put many would be purchasers off and sales volumes wouldn’t justify the outlay. i.e. just too risky.

In my initial enquiry, I mentioned that these and certain other wagons had flown of the shelves and hardly ever appear S/H, but it seems it’s a risk they are not currently prepared to take.

 

Complex and expensive to produce might now be limited to novel and attractive items, such as the crane, that will sell well on a one and only production run.

 

 

Ron

Bachmann never produced enough original Autoballasters to make up a set of five. I was told that the licence had expired before another centre wagon was produced. Whilst I’d love to complete my set, I’d be very cautious about buying any re-liveried models unless I could be sure that it would be possible to complete a set.

It’s the way Bachmann does things. It seems sensible to produce a wagon and do subsequent re-numbered runs if the demand is there but if the demand isn’t there we can be left high and dry.

I realise that there are alternatives – run rakes all with the same number (becoming less acceptable nowadays) or re-number using transfers (not good for the cack-handed or for ancient PO wagons with large and distinctive numbers).

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36 minutes ago, JhornG201 said:

I’m hoping for some Caledonian stock or an additional locomotive to sit alongside the Rail 812 Class. A 439 class would be ideal and No. 419 specifically would be perfect! 
 

An LNER D49 and K4 wouldn’t go a miss either! 

K4s are lovely little locos. There weren’t many of them and their sphere of operation was limited but they did appear in LNER green as well as BR liveries and all were named. It is one of the few classes likely to be produced which would truly delight me.

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I'm coming round to the view that we've seen the back of highly detailed wagons, and to a lesser extent, coaches because the major manufacturers (for want of a better term) simply can't make a profit out of them in view of the assembly costs and the price the market will agree to pay. Not the same - yet - with locomotives where we seem to be willing for now to pay higher prices for the extra fidelity.

 

Instead of having nothing, I would be willing to buy detailed mouldings with only essential separately fitted detail that can be clearly seen from viewing range, such as large or long handrails, brake rigging and suchlike. I would hope a balance could be struck, without going as far Hornby's design clever period levels of separate detail.

 

We seem to have been unlucky with Bachmann producing a range of modern wagons just at the wrong time, when lots of separately fitted parts was affordable. Perhaps rather than ditching them, so limited redesigning could be done to increase the amount of moulded detail making further production feasible. Still carries financial risks though.

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Some very valid points being made regarding the Autoballasters, I remember speaking to one of the senior Bachmann reps when I happened to be in the same shop at the same time as him. He was quite rightly very proud of these wagons and I congratulated him on them, he then told me that one of their team who had worked on them was working on a new product and when it came out  it fully lived up to expectations, sorry now I cannot remember which model it was. Some enthusiasts seem to think we can demand a particular product, we can't. What we can do is politely put a case to the reps at a show. I would expect them to put up any reason they can think of to put the counter argument to you, they would be very poor company representatives if they agreed with every idea proposed to them at an exhibition. If they are professional representatives they will take back a rational view put forward and you can then help to influence their decisions. Many years ago at Warley I remember waiting patiently for quite a long time to Mr Hubbard to suggest that given they were producing some excellent Mark 1 coaches they might like to think about producing some SR Mk 1 EMUs. He told me that it was a ridiculous idea and sent me off with a flea in my ear. Maybe he was right from a commercial view!

 

all the best

 

Godfrey

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39 minutes ago, brushman47544 said:

I'm coming round to the view that we've seen the back of highly detailed wagons, and to a lesser extent, coaches because the major manufacturers (for want of a better term) simply can't make a profit out of them in view of the assembly costs and the price the market will agree to pay. Not the same - yet - with locomotives where we seem to be willing for now to pay higher prices for the extra fidelity...

Writing is on the wall though. I'll be in quicker than the robber's dog for the V2s, none of my customary hanging around hoping for discounts later.

 

12 minutes ago, Godfrey Glyn said:

... Many years ago at Warley I remember waiting patiently for quite a long time to Mr Hubbard to suggest that given they were producing some excellent Mark 1 coaches they might like to think about producing some SR Mk 1 EMUs. He told me that it was a ridiculous idea and sent me off with a flea in my ear...

Shrewd operator that Mr Hubbard. My last conversation with him was after the 4CEP had got the nod, and I asked about the possibility of the 2/3 car BR pilot scheme DMU's. The reply was to the effect that if it happened I had to be ready to pony up for them. I did, and seeing the price of the proposed re-issues, am glad that I did.

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4 hours ago, 34theletterbetweenB&D said:

At this point I would 'settle' for Hornby issuing the ex-Airfix GMR generic five plank general merchandise open in appropriate post 1936 railway company and BR period liveries...

 

So long as it was a) cheaper than Bachmann, b) had a chassis to modern standards i.e. good detail with brake blocks in line with the wheels*, and separately moulded handbrake lever, ideally posable, c) had NEM couplings in pockets.  Seems little point otherwise.  Manufacturers in the game of GW opens seem obsessed with china clay hoods, which is fine but no use as a general merchandise wagon.  

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On 06/01/2020 at 07:51, JohnR said:

Anyone else tired of all the posts which think they're so funny saying "Its announced in 2020, but out in 2024" or similar? 

 

We all know that whats announced now wont be out for a while. Long gone are the days of Hornby releasing their catalogue in January and the factory simply pressing a slightly different plastic mould to fit on whatever existing chassis was most suitable. 

Yet Hornby usually deliver within their quoted schedule. Sure, there are exeptions but we don't see them taking 5 years or more.

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11 hours ago, brushman47544 said:

I'm coming round to the view that we've seen the back of highly detailed wagons, and to a lesser extent, coaches because the major manufacturers (for want of a better term) simply can't make a profit out of them in view of the assembly costs and the price the market will agree to pay.......


Rather than seeing the back of highly detailed wagons, we are seeing a small boom in the number being produced by the various new small manufacturers such as Accurascale, Cavalex, Revolution, Hattons, et al.

It’s a shame if Bachmann’s pull back from producing the very high fidelity examples, they gave us a few years ago, is to become a permanent fixture.

 

Hornby have hardly been in the game here though. Apart from a relatively small number of wagons produced to modern day standards, most of their wagon offerings continue to be dated, often crude, sometimes trash.

 

Dapol have given us mixed results, with some absolutely brilliant modern wagons, whereas the others range from quite good, through perfectly acceptable, to could have done better.

 

Heljan have dipped their toes in and out of wagons for the UK, which I think is understandable considering locos are their main route into the UK market.


I have wondered for some time, if wagons will mainly become the preserve of specialist wagon manufacturers. This has happened to a degree in North America.

As I’m already at the point of being “all loco’ed out”, I really need to switch most of my budget to HiFi wagons.

 

 

Ron

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1 hour ago, Denbridge said:

Yet Hornby usually deliver within their quoted schedule. Sure, there are exeptions but we don't see them taking 5 years or more.

 

True, although that may reflect a more advanced stage of development at which the announcements are made. As @AY Mod has explained, Bachmann may be looking to a similar approach from 2020 on.

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37 minutes ago, Edge said:

As a vague hope, I’m hoping that some more 009 stuff is announced - lord knows what exactly, although logic would dictate that it is Talyllyn based because of the Thomas link.

I’m hoping they might produce the narrow gauge goods shed at Lynton. Will save me having to scratch build it at least.

 

As Bachmann are keen on cranes, how about the WD cranes which the L&B had.

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