RJS1977

38 minutes ago, Pacific231G said:

I've seen iconic referred to as a one word cliché and I rather like George Orwell's advice to  “Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print”. The other one that irritates me is "epicentre" when the writer just means "centre".

 

OTOH the usage that really annoys some people but not me is "almost identical" or "almost unique" the argument being that something is either identical to something else or unique or it isn't. I do though think those usages have a meaning that would be difficult to express concisely any other way. Almost unique is rather different from extremely rare so to say that , for example, to say that the use of traversers at Moor Street was "amost unique" expresses the fact that they were AFAIK only used elsewhere in that way as passenger terminus loc releases at Paris Bastille and one or two termini in Australia so it's far stronger than "very rare".

Equally, to say that two locos were almost identical conveys more than just a close similarity but that it would only take some very minor changes to make them identical (two locomotives could never of course be truly identical because their numberplates are different!)   

"Almost unique" is fine, as you say, that means there are very few (possibly only two) of them.

The bad usage is "very unique".

A school once had a sign outside it:

"DRIVE CAREFULLY PAST SCHOOLS. DON'T KILL A CHILD"

Underneath, in a childish scrawl:

"Wait for a teecher"

Good plan, but just wondering if the point leading into the bay platform would be better as a right hander, forming part of the curve, rather than as a left hander immediately after it. 

Planning application now submitted for the relocation of Stoke Cannon signal box to Wallingford, and erection of a water tank.

https://data.southoxon.gov.uk/ccm/support/Main.jsp?MODULE=ApplicationDetails&REF=P23%2FS0526%2FFUL&fbclid=IwAR3MOn4rfKHKBKCBrD93WNlNVYvqUEvBD6v6GyJB1Cy3Wb68vWF9dvmkXrk#exactline

Submissions in support of the project would be welcomed!

4 hours ago, Huw Griffiths said:

In some ways, this reminds me of GMRC (I wish they'd revive that - preferably somewhere other than Channel 5 - as they don't always seem to allow programmes enough time to get established).

So do I - albeit for the somewhat selfish reason that I want a go! At least two groups invited me on to their teams for the first series, but I was unable to take part as I had recorded an episode of "Eggheads" a year or so previously and had signed an undertaking not to make any other TV appearances until it aired. So I had to sit it out, despite the action taking place just up the road from me!

51 minutes ago, melmerby said:

Probably because they are trying to engender a hundred years of Hornby Heritage.

The current firm is more closely related to the history of Triang, than Hornby but Hornby had a more exalted reputation

What was labelled "Triang Hornby" after the takeover were Triang products and the current company is decended from them.

The Hornby Dublo range went to Wrenn (also controlled by Lines Bros at the time) and became Triang Wrenn.

I don't think Hornby are hiding the Triang heritage particularly - the new Rocket set, for example, was made available in a box with Triang branding, and a couple of years back a version of the 9F was released in a Triang-Hornby box. I'm not sure how Hornby (re)acquired the rights to the Triang name - when Dunbee Combex-Marx bought Triang-Hornby in 1973, the rights to the Triang name remained with the parent company. Perhaps Hornby are using the name under licence (much as BMW use the Rolls Royce name under licence from the aero engine company) but that licence doesn't run to using it on TV. Or maybe they just felt the whole story of Hornby's multiple mergers, takeovers and dissolutions was too complicated for TV.

Simon

Thanks for posting this - the layout is looking good.

It would be nice to have it at Kenavon sometime but I'm afraid we can't run to van hire, and it sounds as if the set-up time is rather longer than we can accommodate, so sadly I don't think it's a practical proposition for us.

However I'd be more than happy to help operate at other shows (I can only do Saturdays) if needed.

Richard

5 minutes ago, Ron Ron Ron said:

As you may well know, the Manchester Airport HS2 station is planned to be located on the other side of the M56 from the airport, with a link to the airport itself.

There are plans to make substantial changes to the local road network around this station, including remodelling and relocating the adjacent M56 Junction 6, slightly to the south west of its present position and providing a new link road to the HS2 station 

In addition, the tram network is being extended to the new station.

 

How much all this will do to improve local connectivity to the HS2 station, I couldn’t even guess, but it does demonstrate that they’re not simply going to dump a new station on the existing local infrastructure.

 

 

.

If they're extending the Manchester Airport tram branch to the HS2 station, this will provide connectivity for the residents of Wythenshawe.

Though, speaking as someone who was born there, I don't think the residents of Wythenshawe are really HS2's target market. 

Were they to extend the Network Rail airport branch to the HS2 station, or extend the Altrincham branch of the Metrolink to the airport HS2 station (potentially turning the existing airport line and the Altrincham line into a giant loop), that might be a different story.

However, the HS2 airport station will offer good connectivity for motorists in the affluent north Cheshire area who can drive to the station.

The idea of a "Four seasons" layout is nothing new - John Wilkes's "Life of a Line" has several scenes depicting a narrow gauge railway's life from opening, through decline to closure, with (IIRC) each scene being a different season.

However I think the ultimate was a layout that was on the South of England circuit some years ago, with four identical scenes arranged around a horizontal axis, with the backscene of one scene being the underside of the baseboard of the next scene. Each scene depicted the same station, again in different seasons and different periods from opening to closure. Every few minutes, as the operating sequence came to an end, all the rolling stock ran off to the fiddle yard, the scenic section was rotated 90 degrees about the axis, and a new sequence started!

Are those shelves built-in under the layout, or can they be wheeled out on castors? If they're built in, they're going to make wiring up under the baseboards/installing point motors interesting!

To my way of thinking, it would have been better to have left the Lion footage out altogether and filmed something else instead.

6 minutes ago, Darius43 said:

After which he could reach for the phone by the chair and call and ask if they have a copy of “Fly Fishing” by J R Hartley…

 

Cheers

 

Darius

Wouldn't he be asking for an R456 signalbox?

1 hour ago, MyRule1 said:

Only just caught up with the latest episode last night. When SK went to his library to research the follow up to Rocket did he not point towards a picture of a rocket as rebuilt and declare that's Lion? I was only viewing it on a 10in tablet.

Just think .... they could have had a shot of Simon dozing in his armchair holding a framed picture of Lion, waking up, looking at the picture, and having a sudden moment of inspiration.... ;-)

8 hours ago, sjrixon said:

Guess I'm going to need a new layout thread and a new name..

 

Great Western Randomness, with a lot of interlopers from other eras and regions. We already have a Mallard and Flying Scotsman, my son also wants a class 37.. Certainly going to be a mixed bag this new layout.. 

Mallard ran on the Western in the 1948 locomotive exchanges - not quite in the GWR period, but close enough.

Flying Scotsman was sometimes based at Southall during McAlpine and Marchington ownership (although Marchington had it rebuilt with smoke deflectors), so not a complete stranger to the Western either, albeit in a different timescale.

Perhaps your six-road fiddle yard could be built as a lift-out tray, which could be replaced by another one (the other trays being kept either under the layout or on shelves on the wall), allowing a change of stock to a different period.

Is that an office desk (i.e. a workstation with a computer, monitor, etc), or a modelling desk, to hold a cutting mat, kit parts, paint, etc)?

(My dining room table currently fulfils both roles, while I have my dinner on my knee!)

10 hours ago, The Johnster said:

The S&DJR had Jinties, 4Fs, and 2Ps in their own livery until they were absorbed by the LMS (1934?), so the Hornby Railroad Jinty is correct, at least in that respect.  Their Jinties were built by Bagnall, the name they were known by on the S&DJ.  Of course, once taken into LMS stock and given LMS numbers they were indistinguishable visually from the LMS  Jinties, 4Fs, and 2Ps. 

 

As you model GW, let me ask the question this way; would you buy a Triang 8750 to run on your layout, with boiler skirts, motor sticking in the cab, the wrong axle spacing because it used the generic Jinty chassis (which is wrong for a Jinty, btw, and the current Hornby Jinty retains this error), the wrong fluted coupling rods held in by slothead screws, flangeless centre wheelset with no pickups, wrong shaped chimney with an incorrect copper cap (they were cast iron on 8750s), silly little mushroomhead buffers, moulded handrails and smokebox dart, no vacuum hoses or fire-iron hooks, and sits too high off the rails at the £50 or more it might cost if you were lucky, but something closer to the £80 Jinty is more likely?  We’ll assume that a modern production of this toy would at least be better finished so far as livery is concerned, and it’d be half the price of a Bachmann 8750, but there is really no comparison between the models in any respect.  I have two Bachmann 8750s, and like my other full-fat, to scale, and fully detailed Bachmann locos nothing has fallen off them in the 7 years I’ve owned them despite my chubby awkward lumpen little piggy hands and fingers, and they run beautifully. The Bachmann costs twice as much as our putative basic Hornby re-introduced Triang, but is three times better!

 

Price and detail apart, models like these are so badly out of scale that there in is nothing you can do to work them up into anything acceptable.  If they were at least to scale, then you could replace the handrails and buffers, glaze the cab windows, improve them with retrofit details, even replace the wheels, motor, and gears with Markits to improve the running and get the motor out of the cab, which could then be detailed up.  But the poor scaling prevents any of this, and you’re stuck with a t*rd that can’t be polished.  

My querying the S&DJR livery wasn't so much about whether it was prototypical, as much as it being an odd choice from a marketing point of view (other than it looks nice) - better in terms of range consistency to have LMS and BR versions with appropriate rolling stock. Additionally, all the preserved examples are either in LMS or BR livery (or in bits!).

Would I buy an 8750 to a similar standard? Not for myself, mostly because I've got several already! But for a son or nephew to foster their interest in railways - absolutely! They're not too worried about the shape of the chimney, that the wheel spacing might be a few scale inches out, or that the connecting rods are wrong (and nor am I, quite frankly!). But would I buy them a £160 tank loco? Probably not!

To my mind, a Pannier is something that absolutely should be in the Railroad range. Once they've got the Holden tank, a couple of coaches and some wagons, it's the obvious next step.... (And, like the Jinty, it's a type - or at least similar enough to a type - that sees regular use on a number of preserved railways).

5 hours ago, The Johnster said:

But who of those wanting cheaper lo-fi models with all the detail moulded on would buy a Triang Jinty nowadays at the probably £50 ballpark it would cost? 

 

If I was modelling the LMS rather than the GWR, and I wanted a Jinty, I for one might well buy one.

And if I had a child of modelling age that I wanted to give a present to, to encourage them on in the hobby, I almost certainly would.

Plus, that sort of model at that kind of price point is the sort of thing that can be marketed to families visiting a heritage railway as a "souvenir" in a way that a full-fat version might not. (Better still if it could be offered as part of a set with a couple of Mark 1s and an oval of track for say £120).

Incidentally, there is currently a Jinty in the Railroad range (in S&DJR livery for some reason), albeit that the price is £80 rather than £50 and the detail is better than on the original Triang model - but even at £80, it's still considerably cheaper than high-spec 0-6-0Ts like the Rapido Hunslet at £129 or the EFE Austerity at £149.

3 hours ago, Jol Wilkinson said:

I was also surprised that over 40% of respondents ticked the box for kit building. The fairly widely expressed view that this aspect of the hobby is in decline would seem to be at odds with that, but it depends on what sort of kit building people are doing. 

Yes, there are of course different types of kit building.

I have built any number of Chivers/Five79 whitemetal Vale of Rheidol locos over the years, but wouldn't know where to start with a Backwoods brass one!

And arguably some of the 3d printed models you can get these days are effectively kits with a very small number of parts....

3 hours ago, BachelorBoy said:

Would we accept less detailed models?

 

Is it fair to say the consensus of this thread is "no"?

 

I would say (certainly from the earlier pages) that it's roughly 50:50.

That's a shame, I was going to invite it to my show next year!

6 hours ago, Dunsignalling said:

 

 

Even Hornby, who do, albeit only "sort of", do very little to promote "Railroad" and rarely add to the range.

 

 

 

 

A search on the Hornby website shows there to be currently something like 90 items in the range (not counting spare parts and some oddities like the TT 08 and the Rivarossi Big Boy that the search also threw up! More than I've seen in the range in a long time.

In terms of "brand new" items in the range, no there haven't been a lot, but in the time the range has existed we've had Tornado, the Crosti 9F, the Mark 1s, the Javelin, and the C4 on the way (and probably others I've forgotten), as well as improved mechanisms for the 0-4-0s and the ex-Lima diesels. I don't think there's necessarily a need for a lot of "brand new" items in a starter range anyway (other than a few up-to-date "modern image items").

I think one of Simon Kohler's intentions on returning to Hornby was to expand the Railroad range - in the earlier TV series, when he discovered that many of the legacy toolings had been destroyed, he said something along the lines that he had been hoping to reintroduce a good number of them.

Children may not be going into model shops these days, but they are still going to heritage railways in good numbers so there is still an interest in trains. Perhaps if Hornby were to talk to the heritage railways more, they could market the range better.

12 hours ago, Keith Addenbrooke said:

 

It's been done (and @Harlequin's subsequent comment about how little space is left for people is clear too):

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGvg9v5zLdA&list=PL5kbxwPyEViQ0jB09Uct4NC4vK2zYsF5D&index=5

 

Link to the heldvomerdbeerfeld channel on YouTube, layout tour begins around 3.30 if you want to skip the preamble which I think is explaining in German how little space there is in the layout room, Keith.

 

Though could the top  loop be pushed further into the corner, and the bottom one possibly reduced to single track, to create more room?

5 hours ago, DY444 said:

 

I imagine that's an extremely complex financial dynamic.  Are the margins higher on the higher spec model?  Will costs be higher if 1000 high spec and 1000 lower spec models are produced vs 2000 higher spec?  How much cheaper can we make the lower spec model for?  How much extra design work do we have to do?  Will the lower spec dilute sales of the higher spec and thus reduce our overall profit on the models?  Will the lower spec have an adverse effect on our reputation going forward?  And probably a zillion more important things I don't know about.

 

Obviously there is a benefit to manufacturers in attracting more people to the hobby and lower prices no doubt play a part in that but at the end of the day these are businesses not philanthropies.  Demand for these high end models seems to me to be pretty healthy and in recent years has spawned some new entrants to the market who appear to be thriving in marked contrast to some previous new entrants.  That suggests serving that high end market well is the right call.  The lack of models generally at lower price points suggests to me that either sufficient demand isn't there or it's uneconomic to attempt to serve it without hand me down tooling like Hornby using Lima.  If there was a vast untapped profitable market in that lower end segment then someone would surely have gone in there?

Again, I'm not necessarily saying manufacturers should make lower spec models of everything - just that there should be sufficient lower-spec models for someone to be able to operate a geographically/historically coherent layout - which Hornby in particular are capable of doing with their back catalogue - and as I noted earlier Railroad does seem to be heading in that direction (with a lot more in that range currently than I've seen in recent years) but aren't quite there yet. And the success of the Railroad 66 in particular suggests that there is a market there.

However I would like to see more "previous version" models appear in the Railroad range when a new-tooled version comes out (e.g. the Terrier) rather than just being dumped altogether. I suspect the reason that doesn't happen is at least in part because Hornby wants everyone to buy the more expensive new model rather than the old one.

Another factor is the actual pricing. We all know that many retailers sell models for well below the manufacturer's RRP - indeed even many of the smaller retailers say "We will match prices elsewhere". So, why not just reduce the RRP in the first place? The Rapido Hunslets have an RRP of £129. I bought mine from Cheltenham for £109, and it doesn't take a lot of imagination to think that by not fitting sprung buffers or firebox glow, and adopting an unlined livery, a price below the psychologically important £100 mark might be possible. Though I appreciate that's not Rapido's philosophy.

2 hours ago, DY444 said:

I haven't read the whole thread so if I'm just saying the same as loads of other folk then I apologise  ...

 

It seems to me that the question is do models to the current standard(s) of detail/features blah, blah sell?  I'm not a retailer or a manufacturer but my perception is that by and large they do.  My memory might be wrong here (the hardware is ageing!) but my recollection was that the first batch of the most expensive new Bachmann 47s sold out first (possibly to Bachmann's surprise).  I see no obvious incentive for manufacturers to produce say £25 coaches if the £60 fully loaded one is a viable commercial proposition. 

 

To my mind it's like saying to BMW we know you can sell all the £50K+ cars you can make but would you stop making those and make something cheaper?   Why would they when they're doing fine thank you very much with what they are doing?  Ergo the only way I see a mass market change to less detail is if the higher spec stuff doesn't sell and I see no sign of that.       

I don't think anyone is saying the manufacturers should stop making highly-detailed models, provided that they also have some models for those who are excluded by the high price of the detailed ones.

17 hours ago, Andy Hayter said:

 

 

 

Aberystwyth is a pretty defined and therefore limiting basis for selecting models - and mine is probably no less limiting - so it's not surprising that companies are not always producing things to your needs.

 

It is just how things work for everyone who has tightly defined area or time period.  There is nothing in Hornby's, Dapol's or Bachmann's announcements so far for this year that interests me.  A couple of years ago my wallet was taking a beating.

 

So "cheaper" models are not available for you and currently nothing is available for me - that will change for me and will probably change for you as well.  

 

And I certainly wasn't intending for it to come across as a complaint.

I understood your point to be that the "cheaper/less detailed" strategy wasn't working because Oxford/EFE weren't selling in huge numbers, and you challenged those of us who think there should be more budget models as to how many we'd bought.

TBF I'm not really too worried about the lack of budget models for my own purposes (though I wouldn't have bought the DG if it had been a £200 high-spec one). Even if I never bought another model again, I have more than enough to keep me happy!

I'm more concerned at attracting the younger generation into the hobby. Whilst sales of traditional train sets may be slowing, the smaller-type shows still attract a good number of families, and plenty of families visit heritage railways etc with excited children. So I think there is still a train-set market there, and Hornby seem to think so as well, given that they're now developing a new train-set type of loco.

The challenge is to get children from the train set into "junior modellers" and then continuing on in the hobby into adulthood and eventually retirement. (By that time, of course, the investment in keeping them in the hobby through childhood and the teenage years will have more than repaid itself). I hear too often of people who were given a train set, watched the train go round a few times, then it was put in a cupboard and eventually wound up on eBay. To encourage children to stay in the hobby, at least two things are needed:

1) Parental encouragement

2) Models that the child/young person (or their parent!) can afford to buy. We weren't always flush with cash when I was growing up, but as well as my original "train set" ( Hornby 101, three four-wheel coaches, a few wagons and a brake van on some old Triang track that may have come from my father's train set), other locos (Lima 94xx and Class 33 spring to mind), and bogie coaches at around the £8-10 mark weren't beyond the reach of a few weeks' pocket money (though true, the bogie coaches are still available at an affordable price). Plus all the usual scenic items (Airfix crane, etc).

(Even with these two things there's no guarantee children will stay in the hobby, but without them, they won't).

And whilst Railroad is a great idea in principle, I'm afraid it's still a bit of a mess - though much less so than for a long time. 

Plenty of "train set fodder" 0-4-0Ts, and plenty of (mostly) modern diesels, along with a smattering of big tender engines (Mallard and Tornado).

There's currently only one GWR bogie coach in the range (and the only GWR loco to pull it is the Holden tank). There are LMS coaches, but no LMS loco, and HST packs, but no extra Mark 3s to expand them. The only 0-6-0T is the S&DJR Jinty.

What's needed for each of the Big 4 (and BR steam) is an 0-6-0 tank, a "medium sized" loco (e.g. 61xx or Dean Goods), and an express loco (Castle or King), plus appropriate rolling stock. Similarly there is currently no class 08 in the range, or any smaller bogie diesels (22/25/31/33/35) apart from the 20.

Ideally the steam locos in the range should be associated with preserved classes ( e.g. Pannier, Jinty, Austerity tank, Terrier) - so families visiting heritage railways on which these classes run can buy a model of the loco they've just travelled behind at the station gift shop on the way out.