Clearwater

28 minutes ago, adb968008 said:

Well theyve taken payment, ive not had the email and its not yet been shipped, so I’m not sure what to think.

 

Did others have payment taken ?

 

yes - payment taken but had the email.

How long until we see aBradley Manor at double the sale price on eBay a la Exeter?

I’ve one on order and will disappointed if I don’t receive it.  However, when I placed the order, not that early, I was vaguely surprised that they were still taking orders.  As such, I wasn’t completely shocked to get the email I did.

David

6 minutes ago, The Stationmaster said:

Or London Gateway?    Or even maybe Southampton?

or Rotterdam and a feeder to Hull/Immingham/Teesport.  Whatever was cheapest.

11 minutes ago, The Stationmaster said:

Agree very much with that.  If he has the visitor attraction experience and skills he sounds like exactly the person they need to develop what they have talked about (and appear to have some money set aside for).  He ought to have an understanding of how such things work and maybe he should start by looking at Pecorama to see how model railways (and other model) sales fit into the overall pattern of such an attraction.

Thanks.  He should also be able to look at the Hornby sales leger and see what sales Hornby make in Pecorama together with which are sellers and, crucially, the margin.  As I recall, they sell a fullish range and full price!

If you’ve been in the themes park business, you may know which ones have struggled through the pandemic, which ones need a facelift, which need something different.   A `JV to rebrand something like Drayton Manor’s `Thomas land (I know H have given up their licence rights) coupled to rides based on other brands could be a smart strategic move.

20 hours ago, andythenorth said:

If that’s true that’s looking like a career wind-down or a passion move. The Lego Group (TLG) is a much bigger enterprise with a much stronger public brand 🙂

Depends.  Could be.  Could also be a situation where if he thinks if he has the right stock option package and there’s a possibility of using his visitor attraction skills to create something, then he might be seeing a very large personal upside.  

Am I misremembering but did Dapol also plan to do the 3150 series?

30 minutes ago, The Stationmaster said:

Warehousing is of course some way from Matgete in teh hands of amajor distrubtion company with good motorway access and handling produv ct from various companies; far better situated than Margate.

 

The problem with any indoor attraction at/near a seaside resort is that for the general market its footfall is very weather dependent.  Sunny day they're on the beach etc, wet days they need somewhere indoors.  The name will attract some visitors obviously but the casual market is a different thing.   And apart from 'the seaside' Margates is in a geographical location which is too remote to attract quite a lot of people.

 

But, as you say, the Pecorama comparison shows the range of things that a good attraction needs to get visitors in.   Some things for a variety of age ranges, some things for good weather (essential near the seaside), and something for bad weather which those there for the outdoor things will also be tempted to visit.  All on a single site, with plenty of parking space (ideally for mountain goats), and with a shop immediately after the model railway layouts have whetted your appetite.  In many respects it's not  the most accessible attraction in that area but it pulls in lots of visitors because of what it offers.

 

Simple comparison - we go to that part of the world because South Devon/south Dorset has plenty of interesting things to visit so we do go to Pecorama as it's 'handy'.  I'm far less tempted to visit Margate because getting there is a much longer drive and you really need a car to get out of the place if you stay in that corner of Kent.

Pecorama also has a neat all year round model.  Huge soft play barn.  Clearly runs large number of under 5s birthday parties year round.  Ditto the Pullman coach for that special afternoon tea.  It's not just train orientated.

The problem with Margate isn’t necessarily is what is in the Centre but that it’s in Margate.  It’s geographically remote, hence also bad as a distribution centre, but won’t have anything like the passing casual visitors that another location might otherwise secure.

It’d be interesting to compare their visitor numbers with pecorama.  But the pecorama offering is quite multi-dimensional (gardens, soft play, mini railway, mini golf etc).  What exactly are they planning and how are they going to get the numbers to visit?

I don’t think this is a real image.  Otherwise it would clearly say that’s it’s been painted from a HST window shedded somewhere in Luton!

Some key pointers to its deepfake status: 

1) can we be certain it’s the uk without the double arrow sign?

2) theres no running in board in western region colours?

3) given it’s obviously wartime, where are the military uniforms and gas masks?  Preferably those smart black uniforms with the nice red and white armbands I sometimes see people dressed in at 1940s weekends?

4). No Greggs on the platform

I think there might be some other mistakes but I can’t be sure.  

49 minutes ago, MikeParkin65 said:

It would be nice to think that some of them at least will benefit some of the surviving real loco's. The Erlestoke Manor Fund for example runs an excellent shop selling all sorts of second hand railway related materials including models from  a converted parcels van at Bewdley station - I'm sure they would welcome a supply of  donated 'withdrawn' Manors :)

Not volunteering but maybe a magazine article on refurbishing a mainline manor would be good timing?  (could make same argument about Class 31/37s)

Hi

why don’t you try contacting Hornby customer service?  They may have a spare they can send you!

9 hours ago, asmay2002 said:

You're making a huge assumption that most people want to model what they remember from when they were trainspotters.  This is increasingly not the case. The 1968-1980 period on Britain's railways was depressingly awful and turned people, including trainspotters, away in droves. (I'm from this demographic and wouldn't model BR from that era if it was the last railway on earth).  Secondly, the number of trainspotters declined hugely from its 1950s heyday so there aren't so many of them coming through anyway.   Modellers are increasingly divided into Nostalgia modellers (mostly ex trainspotters) and what might be called historical modellers, modelling things that they never saw for real but want to recreate.  The popularity of pre-grouping liveries is evidence of this - nobody remembers them first hand but they are attactive.  The lack of pre-grouping modelling until relatively recently was I think because most didn't feel that they had the skill to produce it.  That there was supressed demand came through clearly in a survey on this forum a few years back. There is a bit of a crossover with younger people's first contact with steam having come via a preserved railway.

As you’ve selectively quoted my post, I think you’re missing my point.  I am pointing out that the “heyday” period, ans you call it,  are now no longer forming the main cohort of retirees and that could/should change where the starter train set market should be pitched.  I suspect we’ll see more 70s/80s scene as that generation reaches “nostalgia” phase with an rtr market to match.  I’ve argued before that if you’re a “historic” modeller going back before your own memory, why wouldn’t you go back to a more colourful era?  In 20 years, the number of people with a clear memory of the 1950s, will be very small. Similar to those who as primary school age children will remember the pre war Railway.
 

Youre equally making a massive generalisation of your own in projecting your own view on the 1970s railway scene onto the market as a whole.  Look at layouts like Black Country Blues or Hornsey Broadway as examples of popular successful layouts channeling that run down blue diesel era scene.  I think Charwelton at the recent Stoke Mandeville show was drawing very good crowds…  Or the number of Facebook groups on the 1970s railway scene..  I’ll wager they’re more likely to see a Deltic starter set as interesting over an A1 or a pretty pre grouping loco.  Of course, like all generalisations, there are exceptions.  
 

Equally there are fashions in Railway modelling as in everything else.  Increased availability of pregrouping liveries will show an increase in people wanting/using that stock.  Ditto currently I’d venture for oo9 layouts driven by the improvement in suitable rtr,.  Or 40 years ago the GWR BLT staple/cliche.  Will a 1960s layout be seen as an outdated cliche in 15/20 years?
 

I agree the preservation era impacts what people will remember.  Perhaps the current trend for fictional steam Loco liveries partially reflects? 

2 hours ago, adb968008 said:

If it were me i’d be looking at spend per TT club member, ratio of club members spending / not spending and watching how many drop the club when it becomes paid for… then reexamining those ratios… as that sizes the market base.

it could be some rushed out to buy the novelty discounted TT trainset, put it in their garage waiting for the novelty to wear off / cash it out someday as a collectors item, them buy nothing else TT. Once they fall,off the chart, you know how many customers are left, how much they spend, on what, when and where.

 

It will be interest8ng to see how it stacks up, as prices rise closer to OO.

 

I’d agree  club membership gives some insights but as @gatesheadgeek the membership fee suggest you need to spend £300 to break even.  But people will stay members because they like being a membe rand value the fringe benefits, eg exclusives, as well as the discount.  However, if they’ve got any sense they’ll use the raw sales data from website logins/sales.  They should have a targeted sales system with precise offers to follow up initial sales.  Investment I’m relatively few sales analysts can drive overall sales/margin.

1 hour ago, woodenhead said:

If no-one was buying A1, A2, A3 and A4 Hornby locos then I would agree, but the fact they keep churning them out must mean generally someone is buying them.

 

Also I think Simon Kohler was looking at grandparents buying TT and then influencing the grandchildren into railway modelling, the grand parents being of the 1960s children who remembered the old TT system and Triang.  Probably also linked to them using Dublo as a brand in OO because it harks back to an era.

Sure but that doesn't mean other stuff wouldn't sell. I'd suggest a Deltic plus three coaches is equally a more modern equivalent of the A1 set.  Kolher obviously had a view of what sold and to whom and why but they may be taking a different direction in the future.  Given Hornby and Kohler parted company, we can wonder the extent to which they differed on strategy.

What we don't know is how the internal strategy documents set out how the range would evolve if successful.  If I was a director approving the tooling, I'd have wanted a series of exit points if it wasn't successful and equally a sense of vision as to what to do if it was making money.

I think the arguments about people having less space and hence there being a market opening for TT have some traction.  However, if you're thinking about the market segments, I'd wonder whether TT should be targeting 70s diesel era not the A3 or A4 plus carriages?

If the hypothesis is that the best sellers for Hornby are the "I'll buy him a train set as he retires market now he's got time" then the age of those people retiring are now the ones increasingly for whom their railway salad days were 1968-1980 (a 10 year old in 1968 is 65 and even a 10 year old in 1980 is now 53).  I can see a logic that those people still have the smaller modern houses and hence might not want OO or larger but be amenable to something not as fiddly as N gauge.  Hornby's brand is such that they pick up sales here that others don't. A TT blue/yellow HST set would play to that market plus a certain level of the nostalgia market given it was a core OO set in the late 70s/80s.

David   

4 hours ago, Dunsignalling said:

The exact split of design/development work between commissioners and "commissionees" is obviously not publicised, and may well vary both between participants and individual projects, depending on the commissioner's level of knowledge at the outset.

 

However, I doubt many of them "start from cold" with a proposal to an established "manufacturer" along the lines of "can you make us a Class xyz". There is presumably at least a "design brief" laying down the required specification, and that will need to be far more detailed and researched (and include at least some CAD work) if commissioning directly with a factory in China as Hatton's or Kernow have. 

 

How much Rails do before Bachmann, Dapol, or Sonic get involved is an unknown and from what has appeared in the modelling press Sonic may be something we haven't seen for some years, an integrated design and production operation based in one nation! However, the usual staged approvals of samples by the commissioner will presumably apply until/unless they launch something entirely independently.  

 

The established and new "manufacturers" Hornby, Dapol, Heljan, Bachmann, Accurascale and Rapido (plus others I'm unfamiliar with), perform design work "in house", so their "commissioning" split kicks in one step further along.

 

From that point, though, the process passes to contractors in the far east for tooling and production, which are what I define as "manufacturing", and are likely to follow similar pathways. An area of possible variability may be how far the design of tooling is advanced (if at all) before the factories take over.

 

John    

I suspect its part of the normal sales / market development conversations between commercial parties.  "are you interested in furhter commissions?" "yes - what have you got?" "this or this"  "hmm maybe but I'd be more interested in y as we think a gap" " well we could do that but we'd need this from you to cover development costs" "in that case we'd need the tooling to be exclusive to us" " ah ok, but for what time period?"  " we would like an exclusive livery of your tooling but we want to be the only retailer doing that variant" etc etc.

18 hours ago, spamcan61 said:

Well for starters they have to fund and warehouse the entire production run themselves (rather than flogging it to the large internet retailers) plus if they're selling direct to Joe public rather than retailers they've increased the size of their customer base, and the consequent processing and support costs, by a factor of 10 or maybe 100.  

Their sales are already over £8m in the "D2C" channel.  Rails don't publish turnover in their accounts.  Hatton's turnover is c.£12.5m (all brands).  As such, I'd wager Hornby is already the largest seller of Hornby in the UK.

Note in their extract they talk about the greater control over sales price/gross margin in the D2C segment.   I'd suggest that they already have the scaleable infrastructure to be able to take on extra distribution staff.  I don't think a factor of 10/100 is a reasonable estimate of the increased distribution costs.  In any event, they directly recharge that to customers.  Given that goods come in from China and will then be distributed intra UK from their warehouse, they've already funded a warehouse to take a larger amount of stock that they sell directly.  

23 minutes ago, Fireline said:

LCD was talking about the dramatic "sales" that retailers complained about. D2C is a different animal. As far as I can see, the report makes no mention of undercutting retail outlets, or selling tons of stock off on the cheap. The fire sale merchants prior to LCD didn't care about anyone or anything other than money on the balance sheet.

I think both management approaches  are looking to take retail sales directly to Hornby and the margin themselves.  Fire sales are a direct symptom and readily available.  However, I would strongly suspect that retailers, particularly independent non-internet businesses, would not relish their supplier / manufacturer competing against them in the sales market.  Hornby's ability to use Collectors Club and other loyalty programmes is as much a competitive threat to the small model shop as a fire sale.  

From Hornby's perspective, why wouldn't they want to squeeze out the large internet retailers and take that margin themselves?  Afterall, those entities compete against Hornby through their own label commissions?  Given Hornby don't really manufacture themselves, I see increasingly little difference between them and the likes of Hattons/Rails/Kernow.

What's interesting to me is the change in strategy since LCD came in.  IIRC, one of the things he came in saying (and I'm paraphrasing) is that H needs to stop its online sales, value retailers etc etc.  Now this report has gone back to talking about the value of the D2C channel.... 

On 23/06/2023 at 11:03, The Stationmaster said:

Someone has a bit of faith - shares trading at 19.50 currently so there are a few bulls in the market for what they see as a cheap buy.

But it didn't last - what I presume is the bid price is now done to 18p.  

 

That effectively means that the stock market this afternoon is valuing, by share price, the company at £16,8 million less than it valued it, by a share price, at the beginning of this year.

Enterprise Value (Market Cap plus Net Debt) = c£38m.  Stock is £21m (lower of cost and realisable value - hope auditors kick that tyre).  It does look cheap....

Gosh - I think that crosses the "want" to "need" boundary.

Addition of an etched brass plate to the cab side will elevate it further.

8 minutes ago, adb968008 said:

Black label, suggests to me a King, or a Castle, maybe a County.

Though none of which have much connection with Llangollen.

 

 

I can see your logic.  However, didn’t the a4 black label take ages to sell?  The random buyer might not see value relative to,Hornby but the rmwebber might not want to pay the extra?  Dapol will know what sold and over what time frame.  Perhaps high spec but more niche targeted?

On 28/04/2023 at 07:57, franciswilliamwebb said:

 

87020 "North Briton" at Birmingham New Street on 04/06/84 (my photo)

slightly before my time but slightly surreal to see someone in my old school uniform.  Keep wondering in threads like this whether I’ll see a photo of me one day….

8 hours ago, gwrrob said:

Argyle go up as champions then Phil @Mallard60022 look forward to seeing you at the CBS Arena next season.😉

not confident on the playoffs then?