locoholic

Has there ever been a serious proposal for an east-west direct line at Redhill, to enable through running from Tonbridge to Guildford? When the Channel Tunnel was built, I wondered if a spur would be built to carry freight from the tunnel towards Reading & the Midlands.

Two pictures from the 80s.

Ashton Junction March 1984 OM1 243-007.jpg

 

Those girders on the Swing Bridge are almost as chunky as the new GWML overhead supports!

Because HS2 is being built to address a projected shortage of rail capacity and the trans-Pennine tunnel to address the chronic lack of suitable high capacity road infrastructure.

They are two different solutions to two different problems.

 

 

..

But it's all transport. People and freight can travel by road or rail. Have we gone back to just building more roads, instead of trying to manage demand on infrastructure, and minimise the environmental impact?

If a new motorway was built instead of HS2, that could be justified because it would reduce the demand for train travel between London and the north.

These are the ones that will bring London's rubbish to run a 'power from waste' incinerator, I believe.

I wonder why the incinerator couldn't be built in London, to save them the bother of carting all their rubbish to Severn Beach? Don't they use electricity in London?!

If a new inter-city road link is such a good idea that it's worth a £6 billion tunnel, why on Earth is the same govt building HS2 as a railway, and not a motorway?

I think it's time for more of my medicine, nurse. Perhaps that'll help me understand.

I think that it is very challenging to be a model railway manufacturer.

 

Once upon a time there were two purchasing behaviors:

• Stock sat on shelves until people saved up their money and went to the shops, or grandad/uncle/etc purchased a gift for little Johnny's birthday/Christmas etc. 
• Keen enthusiasts eagerly awaited a new release and purchased it when it became available.

Once upon a time new releases were infrequent and there were relatively few 'new' items in a catalogue each year.   It seems to me that a huge part of the business has migrated to the latter of the two behaviours above.  This has a huge impact. Today new items are hungrily snapped up, but second runs of those items (coaches excepted) have much less interest for today's punters.

 

Surely the massive price increases that we've seen over the last few years are partly due to the manufacturers trying to recoup a much higher percentage of their outlay on tooling from the initial production run, rather than relying on sales in subsequent years? The manufacturers will have been well aware of changing purchasing behaviour, and have adjusted their pricing to ensure that they still make a profit.

The problem comes when they make stuff that people don't want to buy, like for the London Olympics, or spend a fortune on an IT system and senior executives and then have to sell stock off cheap just to maintain cashflow.

Anyway, Hornby have just had £180 off me for some Collett coaches. Hopefully Barclays can see that items like that bring the money in. Maybe they'll persuade Hornby that if they made the maroon versions as well, they'd get even more money off me.

 

Freights from Barking to the NLL must cross to the main lines and it is those ladders which are being (or have been) removed according to some sources.  Freights crossing multiple tracks at 25mph severely impact on main line capacity so if those crossovers are indeed gone that would be a triumph of passenger weighted minutes over network strategy.  The GE route is under immense pressure of capacity and for some time it has been extremely difficult to path freights this way without delaying passenger trains.  There are limited paths in the evening and overnight (subject to engineering works) but precious few options at other times.  Most Thames-side freight therefore goes via the GOBLIN route and those requiring the GE line approach Stratford on the main lines from Ilford.

Obvious solution: re-connect the LTSR to the Romford branch at Upminster, and send the freight via Ockendon and Emerson Park!

It will always be wrong 50% of the time then, or do the ends magically flip around when the train reaches the station at the other end of the line?

Everyone knows that London is more important than anywhere else. Also, most of the other "important" GWR stations weren't termini, and also the plebs had thinned out a bit away from London.

What is the "wrong" end for first class?

At the country end of the platform at Paddington, so the toffs have to elbow their way past the plebs on their way to the ticket barrier!

I have a friend with far too much Lego, when he moved house he ran out of boxes for it on the last night and ended up filling the space under the floorboards with it... (I'm not sure why he did that rather than any of the other options, but)

When I say far too much Lego, I helped him move his boxed sets to free up a bedroom for his young son. It took three of us a day to do it. He also has two 20 foot shipping containers full at the school where he works

If you substitute "model trains" for Lego, I wonder how many on RMWeb would fall into this category?!

Perhaps some balance please? I do not see how or why the perceived and long reported issues you claim of the 73 have anything to do with an entirely different project, under circumstances none of us are aware of. Perhaps rather than your negativity, if you want to see a 'perfect' Class 122 you are proactive in giving constructive comment on the EP samples directly to Dapol. Perhaps you can do some enjoyable and interesting research on the Class 122 and present your findings to Dapol in order to only make the model more enjoyable for all.

 

I do not ever expect everyone to be academic and do their own research before they contact a manufacturer, but I would hope we remind ourselves this is only a model and perhaps we need to keep negativity to ourselves. Please. I am very tired of it all.

 

This is the Class 121/122 thread, and should keep to that. For now, the samples seen look superb, it has inspired me to pre-order one of the exclusive Chiltern 121s with eHatton at good price, if you have some particular concern on the shown samples I am sure Dapol would be very keen to hear from an expert modeller.

Sorry, but I don't think there's much balance in your comments above. The problems with the Class 73 have cast serious doubt about Dapol's ability to control what it gets from the factories in China, and that will apply to the railcars just as much as it did to the Class 73. I will also be deciding whether to buy the railcars once I see the reviews. And as for contacting Dapol with feedback - it's hard enough trying to just buy something from them, sometimes!

Apologies to GWR modellers, but is it a coincidence that for BR era modellers, both the Bachmann Porthole coaches and the Hornby Colletts are only available in carmine and cream? If the model manufacturers want some cash, why don't they make the models we really want to buy?

I would like the 21T and/or 24T BR steel mineral wagon, the LBSC K mogul and C2X, any Scottish 0-6-0 or 4-4-0, and any of the more esoteric DMUs (class 100, 104, 120).

An odd selection, I know, but not much odder than the current/future Oxford range so far.

Mine have been processed. No going back now. Anyone have a couch I can sleep on when I get kicked out the house?

If you've ordered enough, you could live in the box that Hattons packed the wagons into.

Someone's sent me a link to this piece - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/can-Hornby-get-back-on-track-after-the-departure-of-its-boss-a6876371.html

 

A few comments in there which makes me think the journalist spoke to someone who's been within the company. A shame they use an image with a Bachmann loco but that's what happens when freelance photographers take pictures at shows and make them available through media agencies.

Having read the piece in the Independent, I'm pleased to learn that I'm still middle-aged!

However, I would take issue with the idea that railway modelling is a "simple pleasure". Trying to get the body off a Heljan Class 33, or figuring out why one particular item of stock derails on a point isn't my idea of simplicity!

So long as the remainder of the bow-enders hit the shelves, who cares.....

I do - I'm waiting for some coke hoppers and a Q6!!

This thread is the oft-seen case of a hanging posse, the ugly side of humanity that has forgotten which side of the bread carries the butter.   If most folk on this forum removed their Hornby items from their layouts I bet they would look pretty bare and it doesn't matter if folk are RTR-dependent or people who build models.  

 

Reading this thread, one would think Hornby is generally held in low esteem, yet when threads are read about Hornby locos and rolling stock, the picture is well rosy with gushing reviews for GWR bow-end coaches and Stanier non-corridors and for the K1 and 01 and King and S15 and original Bullied Pacific and P2 and Crosti 2-10-0 and the 700 and the Britannia an so forth all the way down the track to the red box company....

I don't see this at all in this thread. What I see is recent Hornby models held in high esteem (apart from certain unfortunate models that needed surgery to deal with bent running plates, etc) but Hornby corporate performance rightly criticised. After all, the company is on the brink of collapse. I can recall some very negative comments about Humbrol paint from someone on here, and Humbrol is part of Hornby, isn't it?

I wonder if the volume of sales & profit margins for the serious models has now shrunk to the extent that it no longer justifies the big corporate structure that Hornby seems to think is necessary? Received wisdom on here is that the train set (& slot-car) market still exists, which would benefit from the larger number of sales outlets that Hornby has. But other manufacturers/commissioners have recently shown that expensive, detailed models can make do with a much lower (& cheaper) profile, & I suspect that the high-end Airfix kits are the same. There would therefore seem to be little logic in keeping all the businesses under the same roof. In fact, the serious model train business has probably been harmed by the corporate approach Hornby adopted, distancing itself from its customers and retailers in a way that a smaller business wouldn't have dreamt of doing. I would still buy a couple of S15s or a rake of coke hoppers even if the boxes didn't have the word Hornby on. The train sets probably need that name. So I think it's time to split the business up into toys and serious models, as they actually have very little in common.

Stationmaster has brought up a point that people are overlooking........ Hornby produces components to build a 'complete' railway from locos to coaches to wagons to track to signals to buildings to control equipment and so on. The commissioners and small independents offer nothing apart from the item they are commissioning, so you buy their loco and fall back on Hornby, or to a lesser extent Bachmann, for the rest. It seems to me the people who profess to having no time or no interest in building things for themselves would suffer the most if Hornby went under.

I'm not so sure about this. In theory it's true, but people moan that retailers can't obtain stock of Hornby track, etc. I bet hardly anyone one here has an exclusively Hornby layout - Peco track, anyone?

At the Alton Febex last weekend where Mark Pretious's 4mm scale model of Merstone had its first outing, we had a chat with Chris from Kernow, who seemed quite taken by the idea of producing an Island O2 in malachite green British Railways livery.

 

We didn't exactly get the impression he was going to rush it out however, and he seemed to be hinting at disappointing sales of the island versions...

 

We shall see.

 

 

Chris

I would buy one of those! I suspect the slow sales of IoW O2s is because of the lack of suitable coaches. That's certainly what has put me off.

All Kernow need to do is announce they're commissioning two types of IOW coach - an ordinary one and a brake, and sales will pick up. They should just pick either the commonest ones on the island in the 1950s, or the most representative ones that survive at Haven Street. I know the island coaches were a bunch of mongrels, but (I hesitate to say this, but I think it's true) to most people they all look roughly the same. To get the right atmosphere for an IoW model you just need a bunch of ancient looking coaches with low roofs.

The OO9 Lynton & Barnstaple coaches have whetted people's appetites, and I suspect the locos will sell well (despite the high price) because you will be able to buy a fair representation of a whole train.

I admire Kernow Models a lot, but sometimes their decisions seem a bit odd, especially the continued lack of the centre coach for the Hampshire DEMU.

Children are still interested, but not as interested as in the period between the 60s and 80s - I would hazard that toy trains began to wane in popularity amongst children as the numbers of child trainspotters also tailed off.

 

Wall Street Journal article, its not just a problem here:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/end-of-the-line-for-model-trains-aging-hobbyists-trundle-on-1455157546?mod=e2fb 

The WSJ article refers to retirement homes with their own model railway. That sounds so attractive, until you start to imagine all the arguments about whether it should be OO, EM or O gauge, DCC or analogue, etc. etc.

Could be the way forward for Hornby, though - joint ventures with McCarthy & Stone?!

If I was a betting man, I wouldn't put money on the Hornby CEO still being in post in a couple of months time.

But of course, the funny thing is that he WAS a betting man, being a director of Ladbrokes!

Seriously, though, the top management team at Hornby have proved to be a disaster. The decisions they've taken have led directly to the current mess. If I was a shareholder, I would be looking for some meaningful taking of responsibility at a very senior level, soon.

What is really stupid is the pathetic progress we have made to reduce our energy demand by reducing waste, insulating houses, etc.

I wonder if this will affect the flow of products from China? Manufacturers are not going to be willing to ship stuff if they're not confident they'll get paid for it.

They look very good. The weathered one doesn't look very weathered, though.