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After a busy weekend Trainsporters are now fully stocked for the next few weeks!

Hi All,

Just to confirm that The Box Boys from Trainsporters Limited, continue to listen to your requests and have now released some additional OO gauge storage boxes in 10L form.  These can be found at www.trainsporters.com and are also available as foam only, as well as complete systems in Really Useful boxes

Thank you for all your support.

Very best regards,

Mark.

One of The Box Boys!

Dear All,

It’s time for another newsletter from the Box Boys.  It only seems like yesterday since we wrote the last one and a lot of water has passed under our bridge here at Trainsporters since then.

In September we celebrate the first anniversary of the website going live and the launch of our business, an interesting experience in the thick of COVID-19!  Before then we had sold a small number of boxes to our fellow club members at the Hillingdon Railway Modellers Club and some to the Guildford O Gauge and Twickenham clubs all were known to us and supported us tremendously.

We had tested the water in early 2020 when we attended the Kettering show, little were we to know that would be the first and last exhibition of that and this year so far!  However, as we write this note we are excited to see the green shoots of normality returning.  Disappointedly our first outing, which was to have been Guildex in Stafford this September, has been cancelled, but we are still hopeful of our other bookings at Folkestone, Tolworth, still going ahead, we will also be attending the Guildford O gauge open day, The Great Electric Train Show, and the Reading Trade show, we are very keen to start meeting you all in person.

For those of you that have ordered from us in the past ten months, we are very grateful for the perfect start you have given the company and for the very positive reviews you have left for us.  Where possible we try to improve our products and services as much as possible and your feedback has been invaluable.  We also have a number of other new product options in the melting pot, more on that later.

We did experience an interesting phenomenon around Christmas time when we had an increasing number of broken corners and handles on the boxes we were sending out.  With the benefit of hindsight we believe this was solely due to the increased volume of parcels and the sheer weight that imposed on some of the freight transport used at that time of year, especially as more and more people seem to be buying online nowadays.  However, for safe measure, we added extra packing in the box to support specific areas of the cardboard shipping box and that has rectified the issue.

We also took the bold step of standardising our box pricing and offering free shipping, that has certainly made ordering simpler and has increased interest in our product.  We have also had to stay true to our customers and keep the price at a reasonable rate, despite suffering from increased costs from the foam manufacturers and we are sure you will have heard of the supply chain issues with cardboard at the moment.  We have not increased our prices and hope that things will return to their original raw material costs at some point next year.

We have reviewed the option of supplying just the foam inserts but unfortunately we cannot get to an attractive price point especially when we add in the shipping costs, however we will be bringing inserts with us to the shows where it will be of much more cost effective for people to purchase.  We are about to post the paper insert templates online for those that would wish to print more off for themselves.

We will also be bringing some electronic “solder your own” kit samples to the shows to gauge the interest in those items.  The first kits will be a couple of hand controllers, a simple DC controller and a version of the much loved Kent Panel Control pulsed controller.  Both will give fine control of DC layouts and come complete with everything one would need to build your own high quality hand controller.  We will also be bringing out some Transformer boxes and Capacitor Discharge Units, all in the “solder your own” range.  We will also have a trainsistors website for you to order from.

Finally, we are still hopeful of being able to supply some train formations in our boxes and at the moment are considering some presflo options using some of the fine rolling stock from Ellis Trains and some Dapol Pannier or Class 08 locomotive power, please feel free to give us your thoughts on the above.  Again we will launch these on our trainsformations our website soon.

Stay well, stay safe and very best regards,

Mark, Carl and Tony.

The Box Boys

Trainsporters

info@trainsporters.com

0333 4040 811

2020 in Review

December 30, 2020

As we ponder the events of 2020 and look forward to 2021, it is difficult to recognize the differences now, compared to this time last year! Here at Trainsporters we have to pinch ourselves to remind us how lucky we have been in starting our new company and the success we have had so far. Our saving grace has been launching our online sales website. Little did we know that when we attended our first exhibition at Kettering in March this year, that would be our last for quite some time. We are still not entirely sure when we will be able to take our wares on the road again and hopefully meet many of you.

We began our actual trading activity in August this year and have been delighted with the response, not only the sales, but also the very positive feedback and reviews we have received. We have been looking into how we can adopt some of the suggestions made and many of those improvements are in the pipeline. One area we have started to improve on, is to make the cardboard boxes we use to transport the product, more resilient to the trials and tribulations of shipping. Whilst we have been quick to replace any damages that have occurred in transit, we would ideally like to reduce the chance of that happening in the first place. So, we are adding an additional internal cardboard wrapper to give even more protection to the lid and handle sections of the boxes.

Unfortunately, we have also seen the price of the foam used for our inserts rise dramatically this year and while we have been able to absorb most of these additional costs, we are not able to sustain our current price model. Therefore, from the 1st January 2021 we will be charging a couple of flat rates for our boxes. These will include shipping, so the 20L versions will retail for£40 and the 33L versions will sell for £45. For orders of 5 or more we offer a 5% discount and for 10 or more a 10% discount.

We have also been looking at developing the range further with the option of a two-layer box. Many of you have suggested this would be a good option and we are working on that design.  The biggest hurdle at the moment, is keeping the box’s rigidity while not making it too heavy, once fully loaded with two layers of stock. We are also looking into the viability of supplying just the foam inserts, as we are aware that many of you already have a selection of the 20 and 33 litre versions of the Really Useful Product.

Also in the pipeline for 2021 is a range of train sets; these will all be prototypical of actual train formations, with photos to evidence the formation so that customers can be assured of complete authenticity.  We are planning to work with several companies to ensure we have the best of breed from a range of manufacturers, so that authenticity is not compromised. We are currently working on what train formations, in both O and OO, would be the most appealing, so please put forward any suggestions you might have. We are likely to be offering the first batch, very early in 2021, so do keep your eye out for announcements on our Facebook and Website pages.

One of our other passions is education and the wish to keep old skills alive. One such area is soldering and electronic kit building. To this end we are working on a number of DC and DCC kit projects, especially targeted at the locomotive control side of the hobby. Access to some of the older tried and tested versions of controllers in kit form, seems to have struck a chord with some of our customers. In addition, we are working on a kit based DCC booster, which should offer DCC improvements for larger layouts at very reasonable prices. Please keep an eye out for our sister company, Trainsistors, for future kit releases.

So, a very big thank you to all of our existing customers and we look forward to meeting many of you as we get back to some semblance of normality next year. To those of you that have not bought from us before, we believe the quality of product and service will help you understand why many of our customers keep coming back to us. That just leaves us to wish you a Happy New Year, stay well, stay safe and we look forward to serving you for many years to come.

Very best wishes, “The Box Boys”,

Mark, Carl and Tony.

info@trainsporters.com

www.trainsporters.com

0333 4040 811