Midland Mole

For some reason of all the goods formations seen during the steam era, milk trains are one of my favourites to see modelled. No idea why. Just another example of what an odd person I am I guess 😄

I'm not particularly interested in most diesels, but I've always had a soft spot for some earlier types like the Warships and Hymeks. These look really nice and I hope they do well.

Can't happen soon enough. No more will that hideous livery blight the 323s! 😄

That Hornby set was produced in 2013, for the 60th anniversary of the film as noted on the box front. I assume Hornby had the rights to produce the set at the time, and I'd also imagine that is why Hornby felt they had first dibs on the rights for the 70th anniversary which Rapido managed to get instead. As can be seen the set was a very half-arsed approach to doing a Titfield set, using entirely old toolings Hornby already had. I would not be at all surprised if that was one of the factors that led to Studio Canal going with Rapido over Hornby the second time considering the quality of the 60th and 70th anniversary sets are like night and day.

Wow, 800 pages. Quite the milestone! Looking forward to 800 more 😉

Great news! I need a curly roof brake so pleased to see these.

I will stop going on about it as I don't want to hijack the thread, but as someone who has been a fan of steampunk for many years now it somewhat saddens me to think people take what Hornby produced as in anyway representative of the Steampunk hobby. It isn't at all! It's far more than just sticking cogs on things. To me a good comparison would be people thinking Hornby Playtrains is representative of the wider model railway hobby, and I think we can all agree that would not be a good thing.

Which is another issue with the broad brush approach the Hornby took. There is plenty of steampunk fiction out there where the trains are completely normal and historically accurate, with the steampunk aesthetic used mostly for personal equipment of other forms of transport such as airships etc. Steamboy, a well known Japanese anime film, is a good example where most of the trains in the film are completely normal late 19th/early 20th century trains. Steampunk is a setting that covers so many different approaches to the world aesthetic.

Absolutely superb!

Most steampunk activity is based around cosplay (basically re-enacting but involving fictional settings/characters). There are a lot of incredibly talented makers out there in the steampunk world of all sorts of ages who make amazing costume parts, replica weapons, pieces of equipment, etc in the steampunk style. Some of the creations are genuine works of art that have been painstakingly created over months. There is inevitably a lot of crossover between the world of steampunk and the world of railways. A large part of the appeal of steampunk is people modifying or making items unique to them, which to me is one of the reasons the Hornby range fails.

While you are 100% right in bringing the complexity up, as it is indeed a tough old sound to get right, I'd say there is a good element of incompetence when it comes to DTG and sound. Even on a good day sound is usually the weakest element of DTG releases, hence why there is such a market for the 3rd party sound packs from the likes of Armstrong Powerhouse 😉 But yes, fingers crossed the sound profile for 323s fully captures the really interesting sounds of the units. That would set them off perfectly 👌

Maybe a requirement because that junction is where the line met the mainline?

What a lovely scheme! I'll have to look out for the book next time I'm over at one of the railways.

It'll be interesting to see how the shade of crimson compares between the 483/Evo coaches and the Bachmann 4P/1P. The Rapido renders certainly show a nice rich and deep colour.

I guess the problem with the main range Compounds is the fact they date to the era when pre-grouping was still seen as too niche for the mass market. Which is why we also never got MR versions of the 1F and 3F when Bachmann did them. Thankfully those days have been mostly left behind, but it means many classes done by the old guard manufacturers never got the treatment classes done in the last few years have. Plus Bachmann and Hornby seemingly don't like making the most of their new toolings when it comes to livery options, compared to companies like Accurascale and Rapido where you get basically every livery under the sun for classes 😉