Hornby 2022 Range - pre-announcement frothing - now closed

[Widnes Model Centre]

2 minutes ago, adb968008 said:

 

 

i’m just a customer, 

What i’m not understanding is if or how to reliably place an order on Monday knowing my chosen retailers have the manufacturers support to deliver it.

 

 

 

Hi John, fully understand where you are coming from. We have been asked the same thing by our customers. We couldn't answer.

As someone who has visited our "Museum" you can probably understand our frustration.

[Dunsignalling]

13 minutes ago, Widnes Model Centre said:

 

Hi John, my earlier post. We were informed this week that Tier 1 Retailers can order from 10th January, Tier 2 will be able to have their orders looked at on the 24th January.

Yes, and I'm not saying it does happen, but my concern is that orders accepted from Tier 2 dealers might subsequently be cut back to favour orders from Tier 1 placed after the 24th, which I would consider unethical.. .

 

The core problem is under-supply, but the practical solution to that (from Hornby's standpoint) is to make exactly the number of models ordered. That, however would mean showing their hand on new products a long way in advance. Bye-bye annual announce-fest, and having done that, a move to direct selling becomes ever more logical.   

 

John

Edited January 8, 2022 by Dunsignalling

[Dunsignalling]

7 minutes ago, adb968008 said:

Are Tier 1 retailers protected from future unexpected reductions in quantity, after placing their orders though ?

Are they any more secure ?

 

More, but not fully, would be my guess. 

[Widnes Model Centre]

2 minutes ago, adb968008 said:

Are Tier 1 retailers protected from future unexpected reductions in quantity, after placing their orders though ?

 

 

 

If I understand correctly,no. But that is only my understanding. Logic would say.. Hornby make 1000.  A Tier 1 shop orders 999. Not going to work.

[adb968008]

8 minutes ago, Widnes Model Centre said:

 

Hi John, fully understand where you are coming from. We have been asked the same thing by our customers. We couldn't answer.

As someone who has visited our "Palace" you can probably understand our frustration.

Edited it for you, Your shop is brilliant…

 

I just wish you were a bit closer to Surrey, as we don't have anything like it around here, in anything less than a day out travelling.

Publicising the whole Tiering seems bizarre to me.

it destroys confidence… 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[adb968008]

41 minutes ago, Dunsignalling said:

Yes, and I'm not saying it does happen, but my concern is that orders accepted from Tier 2 dealers might subsequently be cut back to favour orders from Tier 1 placed after the 24th, which I would consider unethical.. .

 

The core problem is under-supply, but the practical solution to that (from Hornby's standpoint) is to make exactly the number of models ordered. That, however would mean showing their hand on new products a long way in advance. Bye-bye annual announce-fest, and having done that, a move to direct selling becomes ever more logical.   

 

John

But ..

 

There is no published list of who is who…

Last year the Dublo MNs were sold out by lunch on day 1….

 

So as a customer who wants one of a limited edition of 500… who do you order from to guarentee you get it…

 

Should I just order 1 from every shop on the internet and hope for the best, then wait to see who has to cancel on Jan 25th ?.. if all cancel, well I still have my last resort option at Hornby.com?

 

How is this helpful to anyone ?

Customers need confidence to know they can order in a stable manner…even better, not pre-order at all… just walk up to their shop on the day of release and buy one.

 

 

Edited January 8, 2022 by adb968008

[Dunsignalling]

10 minutes ago, adb968008 said:

But ..

 

There is no published list of who is who…

Last year the Dublo MNs were sold out by lunch on day 1….

 

So as a customer who wants one of a limited edition of 500… who do you order from to guarentee you get it…

 

Should I just order 1 from every shop on the internet and hope for the best, then wait to see who has to cancel on Jan 25th ?

 

 

 

 

You probably can't, an edition of 500 is probably a lottery for all but the plutocrats with standing orders for one of everything.

 

Over the years, I've had a couple from editions of 750 direct from the Collector's Club with no trouble at all, but the recent "Dublo" ones were very different animals

Best bet would be a long-established dealer with whom you have been spending a lot of money over a long time, I'd suggest,  but even that is unlikely to be foolproof.

 

Your last suggestion  is worth a try, but if that doesn't work, dig deep, head for eBay and hold your nose is my advice if you are really that keen/desperate. 

 

John

Edited January 8, 2022 by Dunsignalling

[Legend]

1 hour ago, adb968008 said:

Edited it for you, Your shop is brilliant…

 

I just wish you were a bit closer to Surrey, as we don't have anything like it around here, in anything less than a day out travelling.

Publicising the whole Tiering seems bizarre to me.

it destroys confidence… 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nah if you’re going to expand , the whole of West Central Scotland is available . Any model shops we have , like Cambuslang ( I thought he was retiring) are very very small . 

[GordonC]

Wow!! All these discussions over pre-orders for Hornby. Hornby have got to be THE worst of any of the manufacturers to place pre-orders for. Anything pre-ordered on Monday may not be seen until 2024, price increases at random e.g. APT packs increasing by £100 or 25% from the announced price in the last 5 months prior to delivery, confusion over whether the 7 car pack has 2 motored cars or not, not knowing whether 1 has enough muscle to handle a full rake, huge capacitors visible inside the passenger coaches. Freight Class 31s turning up with ETH sockets. Poor colour matches and normally doing very little about it in subsequent releases of the same liveries. Light bleed on £75 Mk3 DVTs.

 

Anything Hornby announce I'm going to want to see in the flesh and know exactly how much it'll be before deciding whether I want one or not. If I miss out I miss out, it really isn't important.

 

 

[rovex]

Sorry if this off topic but a GWR Mink F, would be a good bet. Never been available RTR and I know of only one in kit form and that has been unavailable for a very long time.

A well made one has recently sold for £104 on Ebay, which shows a certain amount of pent up demand.

 

Any way I'll let you guys get back to other things.

[PMP]

2 hours ago, DutyDruid said:

 

That pretty much sums up where I was coming from with my original comment.  The reason I latched onto the Centenary stuff as a particular issue with this was that I had particularly remembered one friend who used to use one of the shops I mentioned for Hornby and the other one for Bachmann.  It was his chosen Hornby shop that got kicked out of Tier 1 when it changed hands on the grounds that it was "A New Account" and he then had to scrabble around trying to find the things he wanted because the "other" shop which was still in tier 1 had been up-front with their regular Hornby collectors and had amicably decided who was going to get what.

 

 

The tier system was introduced in 2021. That means the story about them being unable to order 2020 release centenary products because of their position in the tier system can’t be true.
That was my point that @Widnes Model Centrehas so spectacularly missed, despite quoting me from it.
 

[Downer]

1 hour ago, adb968008 said:

 

I just wish you were a bit closer to Surrey, as we don't have anything like it around here

 

You must be in east Surrey, because the Alton Model Shop, just across the western border in Hampshire, is hard to beat.

[Hroth]

9 minutes ago, GordonC said:

Wow!! All these discussions over pre-orders for Hornby. Hornby have got to be THE worst of any of the manufacturers to place pre-orders for. Anything pre-ordered on Monday may not be seen until 2024, price increases at random e.g. APT packs increasing by £100 or 25% from the announced price in the last 5 months prior to delivery, confusion over whether the 7 car pack has 2 motored cars or not, not knowing whether 1 has enough muscle to handle a full rake, huge capacitors visible inside the passenger coaches. Freight Class 31s turning up with ETH sockets. Poor colour matches and normally doing very little about it in subsequent releases of the same liveries. Light bleed on £75 Mk3 DVTs.

 

Anything Hornby announce I'm going to want to see in the flesh and know exactly how much it'll be before deciding whether I want one or not. If I miss out I miss out, it really isn't important.

 

 

It's not just the high-end stuff that's been kicked into the long grass, Hornby offered two Railroad ex-Lima Deltics last January, in green and blue liveries, surely not the most complicated locos to churn out. They've slid from last March to next December. Admittedly they were both TTS models, so it might be that there are stacks of boxes containing the loco parts, awaiting the electronics from the decoder subcontractor...

 

But it's still a woeful delay.

 

[JSpencer]

2 hours ago, adb968008 said:

Are Tier 1 retailers protected from future unexpected reductions in quantity, after placing their orders though ?

Are they any more secure ?

 

There has been a few occasions last year, I ended up either having multiple locos from multiple retailers or a scramble to find one…

 

I really don't want to place 3x pot luck pre-orders for items at 3x different retailers as I really dont want to miss…similarly I dont want a “maybe” to turning into a street fight on ebay to ensure Ive got it….

 

I just want to place 1 order at a time..reliably.

 

Whilst Hornby.com seems to be the only place thats “guarenteed” providing you pay the premium thats not exactly the spirit.

 

 

I have a philosophy that my hobby is there as something for me to enjoy. I refuse to play the game of placing orders with 3 different shops hoping to secure an item that I've always dreamed about.

 

I agree that we end customers just wish to place an order with someone who we feel confident that they will get stock and fulfil my order, correctly package and send the thing and provide a decent level of after sales service should anything go wrong.

 

Hornby direct are not only more expensive than most retailers but also do not match their delivery and after sales service expertise either. Personally I've always felt that Hornby should focus on making the stuff and leave the selling and final delivery to the shops. Each with their own role and expertise....

 

Hornby's competition is not just big shops doing their own commissions (relatively small amounts IMHO), nor the new entrants like Accurascale and Rapido (which Hornby can do nothing about other than deciding what their position will be vis-a-vis them)... 

But their competition is probably people re-enacting that I see a lot of young people getting into these days. Whereby they take on a personality and live a moment in history. It can be WWII, medieval, ancient, renaisance even working in preservation steam. I know a young lady in her 20s dressing up and fighting armour at the weekends and doing knitting (a craft) doing the evenings and I see she is not alone.

 

My point is, if the hobby becomes stressful, then it is no longer a hobby. I don't have this stress when buying medieval swords and things for re-enacting, nor doing leather craft... And my budget can switch easily from one hobby to the other.

I will try to buy the Hornby products that please me, but I'm not going to loose time and sleep over it if I need to use a lot of calculas to determine how the purchase should be made!

[wombatofludham]

19 minutes ago, GordonC said:

Light bleed on £75 Mk3 DVTs.

 

That was appalling and to me is indicative of Hornby's lack of interest in post-steam modellers.  They had to be dragged kicking and screaming into another run of the hugely popular and high demand Intercity version, then having gone to the expense of fitting the electronics to control lighting functions by DCC, "forget" to seal the lighting unit.  They might as well have removed the circuitry and lighting and marketed it at the price of a hauled coach.  Fortunately I had one from the first batch, and although I did buy one of the light bleeders for a second rake, I can always use the second one as hauled stock following a TDM failure, at least until I can get round to fixing the light bleed.

However, when this sort of thing happens it is almost always on non-steam items and just stokes the arguments many of us have about Hornby not being serious about their non-steam customers.

[JSpencer]

19 minutes ago, PMP said:

 

 

The tier system was introduced in 2021. That means the story about them being unable to order 2020 release centenary products because of their position in the tier system can’t be true.
That was my point that @Widnes Model Centrehas so spectacularly missed, despite quoting me from it.
 

Yes but the tier system suddenly also applied to everything that had yet to be released from 2020 as well (I believe). 

[Steamport Southport]

13 minutes ago, PMP said:

 

 

The tier system was introduced in 2021. That means the story about them being unable to order 2020 release centenary products because of their position in the tier system can’t be true.
That was my point that @Widnes Model Centrehas so spectacularly missed, despite quoting me from it.
 

 

But as we are saying that system was already in place, just that it wasn't publicised. It took a bit of digging for people to understand why their allocations had been cut.

 

Those are the items that got cut by Hornby after we ordered them. Here's the Hornby announcement.

 

https://www.hattons.co.uk/newsdetail?id=606

 

Hornby moved the goal posts after the retailers and the customers had ordered the items.

 

How many got let down over Rockets for example? Cut short due to the tier system in 2020. I had to change my order from Hattons to TMC.

 

Guess who got the blame? Hattons....

 

 

 

Jason

[PMP]

3 minutes ago, Steamport Southport said:

 

But as we are saying that system was already in place, just that it wasn't publicised. It took a bit of digging for people to understand why their allocations had been cut.

 

Cut short due to the tier system in 2020. I had to change my order from Hattons to TMC.

 

Guess who got the blame? Hattons....

 

 

 

Jason

There was no tier system in 2020. Read what Hornby said.

[spamcan61]

8 minutes ago, JSpencer said:

Personally I've always felt that Hornby should focus on making the stuff and leave the selling and final delivery to the shops. Each with their own role and expertise....

 

Abso - flipping - lutely, 100% agree. Manufacturers focus on manufacturing and leave retailing to shops. Not the way it's going though ...

[spamcan61]

1 minute ago, PMP said:

There was no tier system in 2020. Read what Hornby said.

But it was applied retrospectively to orders placed for 2020 items, hence Hattons / Rails cancelling people's pre orders en masse.

[PMP]

19 minutes ago, JSpencer said:

Yes but the tier system suddenly also applied to everything that had yet to be released from 2020 as well (I believe). 

Well yes, that’s surely no surprise. 

But as retailers were being told in early 2021 which tiers they were in, the above can’t be true. The tiers didn’t exist at the time this shop was supposed to be taking orders a year earlier. 

 

Edited January 8, 2022 by PMP
Letter change

[PMP]

3 minutes ago, spamcan61 said:

But it was applied retrospectively to orders placed for 2020 items, hence Hattons / Rails cancelling people's pre orders en masse.

I’m not defending Hornbys poor supply chain issues at all, what is clear is that if you were placing orders in 2020 you were doing so under their allocation scheme of the time, not the 2021 tier scheme.

[The Stationmaster]

2 hours ago, adb968008 said:

Are Tier 1 retailers protected from future unexpected reductions in quantity, after placing their orders though ?

Are they any more secure ?

 

There has been a few occasions last year, I ended up either having multiple locos from multiple retailers or a scramble to find one…

 

I really don't want to place 3x pot luck pre-orders for items at 3x different retailers as I really dont want to miss…similarly I dont want a “maybe” to turning into a street fight on ebay to ensure Ive got it….

 

I just want to place 1 order at a time..reliably.

 

Whilst Hornby.com seems to be the only place thats “guarenteed” providing you pay the premium thats not exactly the spirit.

 

In answer to your first question I know that they are not.

 

In answer to your second question - theoretically the answer is 'yes' but it seems that is not an absolute guarantee (although rationing seem to be limited from what i have heard.

 

My viewpoint is a little different from yours.  I inevitably order through one or other of my 'local' model shops (one of which is a long way from me but i do visit it occasionally and have made special journeys in order to do).  I split my ore-orders between the two of them so if Hornby announce something I want I will pre-order it from one of them (or maybe even one from each of them where livery/running number options area being offered).    But I take the firm line if neither if them can supply then Hornby have lost a sale (although I might subsequently happen across one at an exhibition and buy it there).

 

Serves Hornby right but if they can afford to lose a couple of hundred quid's worth of revenue - that's down to them, not to me.   And, equally, despite their financial position we could be forgiven for thinking that they don't mind losing sales through retail outlets.

[Pmorgancym]

7 hours ago, adb968008 said:

A class 180 is to me a nice choice, they've spread themselves around a bit.

Electrostar is the big gap, though I suspect that may get filled sooner than later.

A 185 isnt too bad a choice either.

 

These are the imo are the best choices.

 

Things like Flirts, or 195’s haven't yet got the geography or the liveries behind them, and may struggle in the short term.

 

 

If your going to do a 180 why not tool up for the 175s aswell,

[The Stationmaster]

17 minutes ago, spamcan61 said:

But it was applied retrospectively to orders placed for 2020 items, hence Hattons / Rails cancelling people's pre orders en masse.

No - I think some cancellations - certainly for Rails - predated the tier system and the resultant end customer (and probably retailer) outcry was the reason the tier system was introduced.