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Hornby goes Steampunk in 2020


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On 14/04/2021 at 19:27, Johann Marsbar said:

I thought the Airfix "Lego" was Betta-Builda, as I've still got a load of that from the 1960's in my loft !!

 

Betta-Bilda was brittle rubbish, and being only 1 nub wide and very loose fitting, you could not build anything substantial without it collapsing. As for the roof tiles, they were just impossible to put together. Unfortunately, it was all my parents could afford to get for me. Was it sold in Woolworths?

 

My favourite, after Meccano, was a bridge building set using plastic beams, girders and cross braces, the Chad Valley Build-A-Bridge. Pretty indestructable.

 

 

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27 minutes ago, Ian Morgan said:

 

Betta-Bilda was brittle rubbish, and being only 1 nub wide and very loose fitting, you could not build anything substantial without it collapsing. As for the roof tiles, they were just impossible to put together. Unfortunately, it was all my parents could afford to get for me. Was it sold in Woolworths?

 

My favourite, after Meccano, was a bridge building set using plastic beams, girders and cross braces, the Chad Valley Build-A-Bridge. Pretty indestructable.

 

 

 

Was certainly sold by Woolworths as I seem to recall that some of mine came from there, including a Betta Builda road vehicle of some sort that was a poor imitation of the rather good ones that Lego did at the time.

I had (and actually still have in the loft...) Betta-Bilda, Lego, Meccano and Philiform, the latter being produced in the Netherlands and being a sort of Lego/Meccano style mix that was manufactured in the late 1960's/early 70's and even included a line in railway models that ran on plastic track.

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5 hours ago, Hroth said:

 

I know we're all being pretty sniffy about "Brickpunk", but its not aimed at us, is it?

 

Isn’t it? ;) plenty of adult Lego collectors and I have a few items too.  My mates young lad is an avid Lego builder and he’s said it looks cheap and nasty compared to his Lego! 
I actually think it’s a good idea to expand the range with something like that but why not merge the two ideas and make it compatible? Wagons with a flat brick plate deck to build onto and a basic body on the loco that can be built onto? Introduce more play into it and they’d have a truly innovative product. Smaller models could be built to run on the parental layout and they could even push it into Mortal Engines style big models ;)


https://images.app.goo.gl/BLCcQoeWX5JJW4r58

 

 

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17 hours ago, PaulRhB said:

Isn’t it? ;) plenty of adult Lego collectors and I have a few items too.  My mates young lad is an avid Lego builder and he’s said it looks cheap and nasty compared to his Lego! 
I actually think it’s a good idea to expand the range with something like that but why not merge the two ideas and make it compatible? Wagons with a flat brick plate deck to build onto and a basic body on the loco that can be built onto? Introduce more play into it and they’d have a truly innovative product. Smaller models could be built to run on the parental layout and they could even push it into Mortal Engines style big models ;)


https://images.app.goo.gl/BLCcQoeWX5JJW4r58

 

 

Plenty of Lego sales to adults over the past year.  Even my daughter bought and assembled a lunar lander and bought a display case for it .  She found it a nice relaxation from 13 hour shifts on a hospital ward.

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On 15/04/2021 at 15:55, sparky66 said:

You know what they could have done that would have been neat and fit in well with the previous Basset-Lowke releases? Offer basic motorised 00 locomotive chassis and wagon chassis, with lego nubs on top. So you can essentially build your own locomotives and wagons with lego bricks on top. They could have made some bespoke lego style locomotive parts to mix and match, plus kids could add real lego parts into the mix to expand it. They could even take the range beyond steampunk, offering it as an extension to Hornby 00 with 'build your own' locomotives and wagons for kids that run on standard 00 track. Now that would be a way of combining Lego and Hornby's existing brands in a fun and complementary manner, I know I would have loved that as a kid.

 

On 15/04/2021 at 17:23, Coryton said:

 

I think it's a great idea. I don't think the stud spacing plays that well with typical 00 clearances, but it would fix excellently with the PlayTrains range.

 

Proper Lego trains are nice but really quite pricey.

 

I made something like that myself some years ago by butchering Maerklin My World trucks and screwing Lego plates to them.....and then Maerklin came out with something rather like it themselves.

 

 

 

On 16/04/2021 at 17:18, PaulRhB said:

Isn’t it? ;) plenty of adult Lego collectors and I have a few items too.  My mates young lad is an avid Lego builder and he’s said it looks cheap and nasty compared to his Lego! 
I actually think it’s a good idea to expand the range with something like that but why not merge the two ideas and make it compatible? Wagons with a flat brick plate deck to build onto and a basic body on the loco that can be built onto? Introduce more play into it and they’d have a truly innovative product. Smaller models could be built to run on the parental layout and they could even push it into Mortal Engines style big models ;)


https://images.app.goo.gl/BLCcQoeWX5JJW4r58

 

 

 

 

I don't know how popular it ever proved to be, but this appeared from LGB a couple of years ago https://www.swl4.com/LGB-90463_Building-Block-Train-Starter-Set.html 

 

I've used Lego to help build parts of a couple of OO models; 4 studs x 10 studs is the same footprint as a 20ft 4mm shipping container, so a 4 x 10 stud plate would translate well onto an existing wagon base. This doesn't leave much space to be creative, but i remember when i was young that the Lego monorail system was only 4 studs wide, and their shipping containers were only 4 studs wide too. Of course, there's nothing stopping folk being creative and expanding outside those dimensions ;) 

 

Create a wagon base with a suitable space in the base plate and fit 'technik' gears to the wagon axles and soon the steam punk Lego gears fitted to the train can start moving...

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21 hours ago, eldomtom2 said:

Well yes, but adult Lego fans probably aren't going to buy this, because it looks like (and almost certainly is) cheap and nasty tat.

I think you've hit on a significant part of the problem with the whole steampunk idea.  without the tv programme readily available (unless it's repeated) the whole idea will seem quirky and strange to many potential purchasers and that won't help sales.  On the other hand some will be attracted by the quirkiness but that will only happen if they see it or have found out about - back to the loss of the impetus from tv.

 

Once again i think Hornby have not been nimble enough and probablypart of that is because they are constrained by not having operational control of any sort of factory or manufacturing capacity where they could have quickly got things up & running.    And like many others in the UK model railway market they have a very long supply line which can at times be unreliable.  The only way they could get round that - and it would have been an idea with steampunk - is to think and act a long way outside the normal supply line box as at least a way of quickly getting things to market.

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Steampunk in general does have some following among a certain teen and twenties demographic, but it doesn’t seem hugely popular in the U.K., where it competes on the same turf as Dr Who - it’s about what/who people want to dress up in!

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So if you want to see old folks like me in Steampunk gear check out Whitby in October.

However I will not be investing in this fad, because it's some cheap locos badly weathered with gears  randomly stuck on.  This on the other hand is my vampire killing nerf gun  -

image.png.f52414ae7556dbd854dd990b49b1e52b.png

 

so if I was going to model this genre I'd be like the chap on the telly and make my own

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I’ve never seen anyone dressed as a steampunk in the U.K.

Is this genre more popular in Germany ? They like dressing up more than us it seems...the industrial and industrial dance/ music scene for instance seems way bigger there

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8 minutes ago, rob D2 said:

I’ve never seen anyone dressed as a steampunk in the U.K.

 

Then you aren't going to the right places. Any sci-fi festival will have some Steampunk costumes present. An actual Steampunk event at a preserved railway can apparently attract 45,000 people over a weekend in normal times.

 

This photo is from the London Model Engineering Exhibition a couple of years ago:

 

P1200016.JPG

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10 minutes ago, rob D2 said:

I’ve never seen anyone dressed as a steampunk in the U.K.

Is this genre more popular in Germany ? They like dressing up more than us it seems...the industrial and industrial dance/ music scene for instance seems way bigger there

 

We have them in Wigan, they mix with the Martians who land here every Friday night for their green snot pies !!!!!!

 

Brit15

 

 

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On 18/04/2021 at 11:20, The Stationmaster said:

I think you've hit on a significant part of the problem with the whole steampunk idea.  without the tv programme readily available (unless it's repeated) the whole idea will seem quirky and strange to many potential purchasers and that won't help sales.

 

Which TV programme? The behind the scenes documentary won't have driven any sales - but then the Steampunk genre is incredibly popular, it's just not mainstream. I know a couple of preserved lines who say their Steampunk weekend is the busiest, and most profitable, each year.

 

On 18/04/2021 at 11:20, The Stationmaster said:

Once again i think Hornby have not been nimble enough

 

And yet if they are nimble, or try something different, this forum fills with cries that they should stick to their core product of Flying Scotsman models.

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26 minutes ago, Phil Parker said:

 

Which TV programme? The behind the scenes documentary won't have driven any sales - but then the Steampunk genre is incredibly popular, it's just not mainstream.

 

The C5 "Great Model Railway Challenge"...?

 

What would be good now is a Steampunk challenge, to build a loco and stock in the style. I'm sure even I've got a spare Hornby  0-4-0 somewhere...

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3 minutes ago, Phil Parker said:

 

Steampunk, and not derivative, unlike any of the Hornby offerings. And not a gearwheel stuck anywhere!

 

Actually, of all the Hornby Steampunk offerings, their metal figures are useful.  As inhabitants of an Ankh-Morpork and Sto Plains Hygienic Railway platform...

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1 hour ago, Phil Parker said:

 

Then you aren't going to the right places. Any sci-fi festival will have some Steampunk costumes present. An actual Steampunk event at a preserved railway can apparently attract 45,000 people over a weekend in normal times.

 

This photo is from the London Model Engineering Exhibition a couple of years ago:

 

P1200016.JPG

Well there’s two, and one came as Tommy Cooper , was he a steam punk ?

Sci fi festival ? Yep, never likely to do that .

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I bought a can of steampunk beer at the weekend. I have no idea if it's any good, but it just tickled my fancy. I'll report back when I've drunk it.

 

My elder daughter is quite into steampunk, it's one of the reasons (along with anime, her other big artistic interest) why she enjoys going to Comic-con . There's always a big steampunk contingent at events like that.

 

People on a model railway forum dismissing steampunk because they never see it seems to me to be a little lacking in self awareness. How many members of the general, non-modelling public will ever have heard of Warley or Railex? Our perceptions are always limited by our own bubbles. But that doesn't mean other stuff doesn't exist.

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2 hours ago, MarkSG said:

I bought a can of steampunk beer at the weekend. I have no idea if it's any good, but it just tickled my fancy. I'll report back when I've drunk it.

 

My elder daughter is quite into steampunk, it's one of the reasons (along with anime, her other big artistic interest) why she enjoys going to Comic-con . There's always a big steampunk contingent at events like that.

 

People on a model railway forum dismissing steampunk because they never see it seems to me to be a little lacking in self awareness. How many members of the general, non-modelling public will ever have heard of Warley or Railex? Our perceptions are always limited by our own bubbles. But that doesn't mean other stuff doesn't exist.

I get your point , but if you ask most people if they know what a model train is , they do.

If I asked most people I know what steam punk is, they’d have no idea.

 

I think it’s a much more common concept .

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33 minutes ago, rob D2 said:

I get your point , but if you ask most people if they know what a model train is , they do.

If I asked most people I know what steam punk is, they’d have no idea.

 

I think it’s a much more common concept .

 

That is true, however the idea of a fantasy setting featuring trains is a fairly common concept too. Most people just don't know the term 'steampunk' as a way of describing it. In a way Hornby steampunk as an idea isn't too different from some of the old Triang Battle Space sets. It's adding additional play value and fantasy elements to model trains. That said, Horny seem to be marketing this at 'serious' steampunk fans and not so much as something exciting for kids.

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I've been collating a few stats.

 

Google search results for "steampunk uk": 45,000,000

Google search results for "model railways":  2,920,000

 

(I added "uk" to the steampunk search term to make it a better comparison with model railways, otherwise I'd have got global results and would have needed to check for "railroad" as well to get a better comparison)

 

Total pageviews in April 2021 for Wikipedia "Steampunk" article: 59,214

Total pageviews in April 2021 for Wikipedia "Rail Transport Modelling" article: 6,583

 

Facebook groups:

 

Steampunk
Public group  · 39K members

 

Model Railways
Private group  · 14K members

 

British Railway Modelling
Public group  · 16K members

 

Facebook pages:

 

Steampunk Tendencies

Page  · 3M like this

 

Hornby Model Railways

Page  · 77K like this

 

While we're at it, one of Hornby's steampunk wagons is currently in the top ten of Amazon's "Model Train Freight Cars":  https://amzn.to/33kJ4v3

 

So, which is more popular steampunk or model railways? I don't think you can make a direct comparison, because they're not really equivalent things. But whichever way you slice and dice it, steampunk seems to be better represented on the Internet and social media. Of course, that's at least partly because steampunk is a very broad category, covering everything from speculative fiction to styles of clothing (and even beer!), whereas railway modelling is much more focussed. But the point is that "steampunk", as a concept, is widely used and understood.

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1 hour ago, MarkSG said:

I've been collating a few stats.

 

Google search results for "steampunk uk": 45,000,000

Google search results for "model railways":  2,920,000

 

(I added "uk" to the steampunk search term to make it a better comparison with model railways, otherwise I'd have got global results and would have needed to check for "railroad" as well to get a better comparison)

 

Total pageviews in April 2021 for Wikipedia "Steampunk" article: 59,214

Total pageviews in April 2021 for Wikipedia "Rail Transport Modelling" article: 6,583

 

Facebook groups:

 

Steampunk
Public group  · 39K members

 

Model Railways
Private group  · 14K members

 

British Railway Modelling
Public group  · 16K members

 

Facebook pages:

 

Steampunk Tendencies

Page  · 3M like this

 

Hornby Model Railways

Page  · 77K like this

 

While we're at it, one of Hornby's steampunk wagons is currently in the top ten of Amazon's "Model Train Freight Cars":  https://amzn.to/33kJ4v3

 

So, which is more popular steampunk or model railways? I don't think you can make a direct comparison, because they're not really equivalent things. But whichever way you slice and dice it, steampunk seems to be better represented on the Internet and social media. Of course, that's at least partly because steampunk is a very broad category, covering everything from speculative fiction to styles of clothing (and even beer!), whereas railway modelling is much more focussed. But the point is that "steampunk", as a concept, is widely used and understood.

Well, as we know statistics can be used to prove anything, incidentally if you search “ model railways U.K. “ it’s 17,500,000.........but that’s a seriously dodgy way to describe interest,

 

I haven’t the time to look but “ steam punk tendencies “ , sounds more like fashion than steam punk the model railways.

 

And if such things are about dressing up, I’d imagine the demographic is younger than railway models , therefore they are more internet savvy and do more searches.

 

 

 

regardless of my sample here of 4, only me had heard of it - that’s 25% so I’ll stick with that .

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Irrespective of how many people search on what term and their demographic, if it sells Hornby will continue to crank the handle. If it doesn’t, they won’t. 

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On 04/05/2021 at 16:45, rob D2 said:

And if such things are about dressing up, I’d imagine the demographic is younger than railway models , therefore they are more internet savvy and do more searches.

 

While the 'dressing up' is certainly a big part of steampunk, the scene encompasses all sorts of creativity, with many steampunks very much into physical 'makes' including models. One of the chaps in the ME exhibition pic is Herr Doktör, one of the top steampunk makers in the UK. I was part of the steampunk contingent at the ME show and we attracted a lot of interest across the weekend. I'm also a part of the 'Ministry of Steampunk' group who exhibit at the big comic conventions in the UK and will say that these events are easily bigger than any UK model railway exhibition - 100000 across a weekend for the big London show (twice a year) , maybe half that for the biannual con run at the NEC (the November one occasionally falling the same weekend as Warley).

Even the smaller steampunk events that the MoS run attract numbers that any model railway exhibition would dearly love to see (and yes, I organise model railway shows too...) 

 

Cosplay (and I'll include steampunk in that term) is just as creative as model trains, the skills and focus may be different, but the passion and enjoyment are the same. 

 

The age profile of Steampunks is very wide, from pre-teens to octagenarians with 'twin peaks' around the late-teens and late-40s/early-50s. 

 

 

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14 hours ago, CloggyDog said:

 

While the 'dressing up' is certainly a big part of steampunk, the scene encompasses all sorts of creativity, with many steampunks very much into physical 'makes' including models.

 

This is why I think it's not a bad market for Hornby to look at, even if I have my reservations about their way of going about it. Both model railways and steampunk have a strong creative, crafting element to them. Many craft shops, if not most of them, carry steampunk bits and pieces to enable DIY creativity.

 

Actually, I used some steampunk cogs as wagon loads on a diorama a while back, so it can go both ways...

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