Why Do Some Trains Come With Seperate Detail Parts?

[Reorte]

2 hours ago, Phil Parker said:

 

Bachmann has started doing this, but I've always wondered why modellers can't just look at prototype photos. I read someone on Facebook railing against Hattons because they didn't tell him where the big bits of his rail head treatment train should be clipped. Someone pointed out that there was a diagram on the box, but I wondered why he cared since he obviously knew nothing about the prototype. Then I wondered why he'd bought it in the first place. 

Fair point, but I just think that if you're chucking bits in the box it would be nice if some instructions said what they're actually for! It's more than likely that I've worked out I'd like a particular loco but don't know that much about it, even though buying the model is usually part of the path to learning a lot more about it.

 

"Here are your bits, off you go and find out what to do with them" is something I associate with the Ikea instructions having vanished somewhere.

[The Johnster]

5 hours ago, 34theletterbetweenB&D said:

This specific aspect has occasionally made me wonder: this one, every practical piece of detail installed, another relatively similar model from the same maker, whole lot of parts for user installation - and these are not confined to the 'discretionary' parts where the user needs to test to see if they will work on the smallest radius curve on the layout - and I cannot see any rhyme or reason to it.

 

Then again I have been in manufacturing operations management, and when shorthanded/under-resourced/under the cosh/subject to all too frequent power outages, all sorts of unplanned and typically unrecorded short cuts occur. (You have to bite your lip when in front of the unhappy customer and the briefest examination of the offending item makes it clear that assembly stage 159 didn't do the job right.)

 

Per Phil; happy to have the bits and pieces, attached or loose. Much easier than 'find or make'. But again slight puzzlement: this one has the potentially fouling footsteps in the detail pack, excellent. But this very similar model from the same maker doesn't, and one has to 'find or make'.

 

Well it might be. At last count I think there were five items in Bach's range that can carry the 4MT tag, and it is only the BR std 4MT 4-6-0 that derived from Mainline.

 

The 'fully featured' item that sprang into my mind on reading the OP was Bach's Ivatt 4MT 2-6-0. Every bit of the copious external detail that it had been practical to reproduce was attached alright. ( A bit too attached, as detail parts bridged body and mechanism, cemented firmly both ends. Back to 'first world problems'...)

I was assuming that 4MT referred to the BR standard 4MT 4-6-0, derived from a Mainline tooling.  Maybe not accurately, but that's what I assumed...

[Sir TophamHatt]

21 hours ago, 34theletterbetweenB&D said:

Well it might be. At last count I think there were five items in Bach's range that can carry the 4MT tag, and it is only the BR std 4MT 4-6-0 that derived from Mainline.

 

The 'fully featured' item that sprang into my mind on reading the OP was Bach's Ivatt 4MT 2-6-0. Every bit of the copious external detail that it had been practical to reproduce was attached alright. ( A bit too attached, as detail parts bridged body and mechanism, cemented firmly both ends. Back to 'first world problems'...)

 

Sorry, yeah, it is the 4MT tank loco.

Bought it years and years ago but gives some of the latest models a run for their money.