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An attempt to get my pristine, lightly weathered and heavily weathered into some sort of coherent train. From colour photos I have found of the wagons in use in the 60's I hope I have captured the look. There's still a lot of work to do, more subtlety, numbers etc but the project is on its way again. Just putting tracks in for my quarry and cement works built from Walthers kits.

Hi Pteremy, thanks for your comment. I have to say that I am really pleased with the basic model and was delighted when the project was announced. My issue is that weathering on the latest model, as others have stated, is nothing like the masters. My decision to buy the heavily weathered model was based on the masters. If the weathering could not match the masters in production we should have been told and then I would have gone for the pristine version and weathered them myself. Yes of course I'll work on them to try to recover them but I do think that Hattons need to take some responsibility for the production failures.

After a couple of e-mails I have received some feedback from Hattons on the latest 'weathered' hoppers. How they decided that they were weathered well enough to send them out I do not know. My opinion is that the very poor satin brown overpainting that Hattons call weathering is appalling and not 'fit for purpose'. However it seems that they will not recall the wagons for a proper weathering job and there seems to be a 'take it or leave it' stalemate. They have offered to take the latest 9 wagons back for a refund or exchange my pre TOPS 50's to 73 wagons for some pristine post TOPS wagons. That seems to be a non offer as I do not model the TOPS period. It would appear to be more work to remove the TOPS code and renumber etc as there are no transfers available. Yes I could print some transfers and yes I could weather them but why should I spend my time when this problem is due in my opinion to a lack of quality control on Hattons part. I did suggest that I would get the wagons professionally re-weathered and send Hattons the bill. That suggestion was met with a firm response of 'No'. I ordered a full rake of 18 wagons, the other 9 being pristine and lightly weathered. I have weathered up the pristine wagons and I had been very pleased with the overall project until these latest wagons appeared. To send 9 wagons back and leave me with a rake of 9 doesn't seem to be a fair option to me. Im still considering my next steps but perhaps if everyone who is not pleased with their wagons complained directly we may get a change of heart on the part of Hattons. To be honest though I'm not holding my breath. A very poor situation and I think Hattons should be ashamed of their actions.