ruggedpeak

I did say to her I wanted a kids version of the Land Rover socks!

I had a chat with the young lady on the stand and bought 2 pairs of socks for my daughter who was very pleased with them. I really liked the Class 37 entering the station Xmas card, will get some of those later in the year.

Not being funny, can you get assistance at NEC? There were plenty of wheelchair users who got to see it, even during the record attempt. Be a shame to miss it as PW didn't seem inclined to replicate setting the whole thing up again.

Yes, and I overheard PW saying (if I heard correctly) they left one board behind! There are a lot of board joints in the layout and some trains were stopping on points at one end as well. The sensitivity of DCC to shorts in a layout full of joins etc is not ideal. I seem to recall the WiFi issues being discussed after Warley due to similar issues. However irrespective of this it remains a very impressive layout to see and excellent work by the team. It certainly attracted a crowd and the scenic work is fab. Pleased to see the whole thing.

Usual NEC catering plus pulled pork stand and pie and pasty stand. You can leave and re enter if you want a Subway etc

Wunderland works, but is not a portable display layout like Making Tracks. I spent quite a bit of time watching it today and trains kept stopping. Glad they got the record though.

Took a last minute decision to fly in from Switzerland for the show, direct flights into Brum International early morning so ideal. Had to queue for a ticket as I didnt buy in advance but was near the front of the day ticket queue and in at 10am. Queues were not a problem, everyone got in. Very enjoyable show, got busy late morning and lots to see. Good selection of layouts and the non-railway modelling was excellent. A good mixture and planes, trucks and other models probably helped with families and general punters. Good support from the trade, managed to resist only due to cheap easyJet flights with hand baggage only! Good fun to watch PW and the Railnuts get their record. However anyone else attempting a world record, go analogue! DCC is not suited to huge layouts. Some deals that I couldn't take advantage of but plenty of opportunity to talk to the trade. The more I see of TT120 the more I think it works. Just a shame I have a huge OO collection. Having the 37 and 2 armoured vehicles was good. Also fab to see Models4heroes - please donate as they do great work. I sent them a collection of unopened Airfix kits when I emigrated. Definitely an addition to the show calendar.

Oh, that would have been funny to do one of those really annoying Youtube "Auditor" videos!

I doubt the ORR will be forced into anything. How is WCRC running the train going to force anything? Are the HSE forced into allowing things simply because someone persists in law breaking? Certainly be a new angle on UK safety law - safety law is not planning law, doing something unlawful for 4+ years does not automatically give you the right to keep doing it. Nor does ORR not taking action constitute tacit acceptance, again safety regulation does not work that way. If a regulator fails to act without good reason that may make them subject of separate action, but it does not in any way absolve the person/organisation in respect of their liabilities. It is not the ORR's job to follow operators around wiping their snotty noses. They have better things to do, and will have some form of enforcement/inspection plan across the network to follow. That may or may not include keeping tabs on WCRC. Doubtless they will take an interest in what WCRC are doing but IIRC WCRC have submitted an exemption request that is likely to take some weeks/months to process. If WCRC have done their own RA's etc and come up with this as a temporary solution it may or may not be compliant, but it is WCRC's legal responsibility to ensure it is legal and compliant, not ORR's. If there is no decision from ORR that does not give any consent AFAIK to operate under any form of temporary permission/exemption. WCRC running a train doesn't set a precedent, although I have a suspicision WCRC will think it will. If the train is not immediately or obviously dangerous then ORR does not have to intervene. It will get around to looking at the detail of the operation and the regs if and when it decides to. In the meantime, if there is an incident involving the Jacobite then they will get involved. If someone gets hurt it will be for WCRC to explain how it was safe and compliant to operate to ORR, NR and/or the courts, who will then decide whether it was compliant or not. ORR won't be criticised for not taking action in the absence of clear danger or a credible report of serious risk as it has limited resources and has already spent too much time on this one service and small time operator. It still has the rest of the network and millions of other journeys to keep an eye on. Running the Jacobite non-compliantly (and I am not saying it is currently non-compliant) is no different to driving an uninsured car with no MOT on the road - not the Police's responsibility for the consequences of that, they are the drivers. If the Police catch them great, but they can't catch every dodgy driver. Same with the ORR. For me the more interesting question is NR's role in this since they are facilitating the train operating. The key thing is that there are signed documents from WCRC with named individuals responsible for the WCRC safety case and operation. I have seen from bitter experience the inability to prosecute following two fatalities, after a public body had not signed key documents and refused to identify the people who approved the lethal road layout contrary to expert advice.

Great photos, thanks. Glad you have good weather, how as it in the coaches? Mk1's are not locked out of use as people can pass through them, and the toilets are available for use by passengers. I zoomed in to see what the sign on the bulkhead says, "Please keep your dog off the seats, thank you".

This! The cheapest option is for the Government to buy something using a loan, the interest rates it pays are far lower than you get from any finance house. The problem is that loan appears on the Government finance stats, and if you are spraying money around the total number looks bad. So you hide it through privatisation, PFI and other stunts. Much of this was started by the Tories but dear old Gordon Brown exploded it (having basically given it steriods and got it addicted to crack!) because he thought he was being clever (same genius who allowed our gold reserves to be sold at record low prices) [not a political comment BTW but definitely an anti-Gordon Brown comment]. Since then every Government has just continued the same idiocy. Politically you can announce new hospitals, trains, schools and things whilst knowing that the taxpayer will be paying 10x as much for the investment as they needed to. But you don't care as it will be someone else's problem as you will have gone.

I agree. Which raises interesting questions about retailers stocks, turnover of those stocks, cashflow etc that we won't get answers to, but comes back to my earlier point about retail premises. If the bulk of sales and margin/profit is from pre-order or rapid sellout items, what is the point of a retail store full of stock on shelves which only moves very, very slowly as you describe and what are the economics of that? In theory it is a financial drain on the business, Hornby have a financial drain on the business from excess/wrong stock and pass some of it onto retailers who end up with some of that excess/wrong stock costing them retail space and cash. Hence retailers moving into the secondhand market etc en masse and finding other ways to generate profitable revenue streams. Could be worse though, could be trying to sell EV's 🤣

The various general duties under HASAWA are often not well understood, but are a catch all for safety incidents. There is a statutory duty to protect employees and one to protect third parties regardless of whether they are directly part of the activity (e.g. pedestrians walking past a building site). Another one not well understood is the legal requirement for employees to protect themselves and comply with employers instructions - plenty of case law of employees being prosecuted for not protecting their own safety, often where they were injured and the employer is prosecuted for not ensuring their safety by not dealing with poor safety behaviours, whilst the employee is prosecuted for not wearing the provided PPE or following legitimate employer procedures. There does not need to be a specific regulation for someone to be prosecuted due to the breadth of general duties under HASAWA. The duty GTR was prosecuted under for a head out of a window was the same duty used against the Met in the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. So the general duties are wide ranging and cover situations even where there is no specific regulation. UPDATE: as a safety practitioner covering H&S and fire safety, amongst the wider management population the existence and risk associated with the core general duties under both safety regimes is not well understood and I've had plenty of arguments with colleagues who don't understand or even accept this. If you manage people or activities with any risk you need to understand all the general duties as that is where the HSE starts looking to find ways to prosecute.

The latter, if you have armies of managers, lawyers and others employed by each TOC, NR etc etc all negotiating, haggling etc over decisions that is a massive inefficiency not just in terms of salaries and related costs (office space, paperclips, pensions etc) but also in poor decision making. The @Stationmaster has, in other threads, referred to the impact of this. Outsourcing lots of things also creates huge amounts of admin in the public sector, that is armies of people not delivering on the front line. A simple example - DaFT had a directly employed headcount of 2,026 people in 2016 - that is civil servants pushing paper and excluding those in front line delivery exec agencies like DVLA, Trinity House etc. In 2023 the figure is 3,666. Clearly not all will be railway related but what is it about transport that requires 80% more Whitehall civil servants over 7 years? During the same period the same exec agencies doing actual frontline delivery work (DVLA, Trinity, MCA etc) have only increased headcount by 14%. So it is clearly not a huge increase in management and oversight of frontline operational activity. https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/dft-workforce-management-information The cost per passenger is in part dependent upon passenger volumes, so will fluctuate in part due to external factors like working from home and wider policy and other factors.

Perhaps from not having to pay profits and management fees to third parties, for not having massive duplication of administration across multiple TOCS and quangos to oversee them, having potentially more joinned up long term decision making on major spend and investment. As Phil-B has pointed out, the railway now costs far more than it did under BR to operate, so the money is there, just needs to be better managed. This is the big lie around public services, that they need more money. They don't, they need competent management.

This is spot on, my only remark is that this is a general issue across all aspects of the public sector, not just railways. The consultancies have worked with the private sector over several decades to convince simple minded or corrupted politicians and venal senior civil servants that the public sector is inefficient and wasteful with lots of powerpoints and charts. Yet the costs of carrying out even simple tasks under these privatised operations are far higher than doing it in-house. PFI is another example, but there are plenty of others. This is in part why the despite the alleged efficiency of the private sector public sector borrowing continues to grow. As part of the game the civil servants and public sector managers hand over their actual management responsbilities yet have seen substantial pay rises on various false pretexts. Yet as soon as something goes wrong it is amazing how many senior civil servants have to have an operation that happens to coincide with a public inquiry etc. I think it is more than that now, it is the EU style tecnhnocratic approach that some over-promoted civil servant thinks they know more than experience, competent people and a refusal to tackle the real issues as that means hard work and tough decisions that require them to take responsibility. Ideology and personal belief are the driving forces, not reality, proper research and competent management etc. The current shenanigans north of the border are a good example - political meltdown over gender ideology and ridiculous Net Zero targets. No one of any party is really focused on the real issues that matter to real people like the serious failures in health, education, building a boat to service remote islands etc. And this is not a political comment, the same problem is replicated across all parts and levels of the UK, whether devolved, national or local governments. The Scottish thing is just a relevant high profile example today.

I think much of this largely academic, regardless of what any politician wants, it is the Civil Service that has to deliver it, and any concept of a properly run railway means taking control away from DaFT. We've seen repeated examples of the Civil Service actively undermining Government policy and pursuing its own agendas, or just not bothering to work at all. The DaFT turkeys aren't going to vote for Xmas. So even if Labour have a suitable plan, DaFT will probably not implement it. Gatwick station is exactly the same as Munich despite having many machines, partly because many passengers are newly arrived foreigners fresh off a plane and struggling to work out the ticket machine. It is telling that the quickest sales are via rail staff with their handheld ticket machines who provide additional capacity to the machines.....if ever there was a location needing proper ticket offices Gatwick is it. As a Brit it is frustrating to have to stand in a large queue knowing I can buy a ticket in a few seconds if I could get to the damn machine!! Why has no one got to grips with this and realised that self service does not work when you have large volumes of passengers not familiar with the system?

A valid point, Greater Anglia were using Mk3 push pull sets with 90 haulage until the new Stadler units took over in 2020. For some reason in my head I don't equate a Mk3 door as slam door like a 312, but you had to open the window and lean out to get the door open, and slam it shut so the guard didn't have walk down the train to close it! I guess the amount of people in recent history who used those services and were familiar with them probably only had a limited overlap in the Venn diagram of the wider population who visit heritage railways?

Some internet research may help give an indication of the extent of the issue. In Kernow's Bargain section they have 118 different SKU of Hornby OO coaches alone - that is just individual product lines, quantities vary from 1 to "more than 10" aka shedload! The overall total number of Hornby 'bargain' SKU's at Kernow is 285. However put a guesstimate of the average quantity of each SKU and an average value of each item and you don't don't actually get much total value - a rounding error on the £20m accounts figure (say av. quantity 8 per SKU and £30 per item = 8 * 285 * 30 =£68,400). Even if a quarter of the £20m is OO gauge trains (£5m) then the total number of retailers carrying large quantities of these items will struggle to get to a £1m. This is comparable to Bachmann who have 256 SKU's in the Kernow bargain section. Obviously quantities and values will vary so actual value of stock in the bargain bin would require a lot more work (or someone with some good coding skills to scrape the data). But we can conclude 1) it is not just a Hornby issue and perhaps calls into the traditional blue and red business model for trains 2) even with a number of retailers carrying or having access to significant amounts of the surplus stock, it may not even be touching the sides of the problem.

I think you just returned to the hobby 2 or 3 years too early! In a couple of years it should be very different. Personally as a piece of high risk NPD i think they have done an excellent job with TT and would guess sell through etc is probably noticeably better than OO. As they say, overnight success takes about 10 years!

Except that traditional physical retail (i.e. actual shops) requires stock sitting on shelves otherwise people won't come to the shop.

That beautifully sums up the current dysfunctional nature of the UK outline model railway market, except for missing out the extensive duplication of a limited range of items whilst many others that have never been modelled remain unproduced. Hornby and Bachmann should perhaps, if their business model remains limited batch production, focus some more effort on those prototypes that the newcomers will not attempt as they seek to cash in the high volume pre-order items (noting that not all new entrants are heavily into the duplication business).

I was commuting on slam door bouncy seat non-CDL 312's on the Southminster branch in the very late 1990's. According to Wikipedia "The last slam-door stock was withdrawn by South Eastern Trains in December 2005" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slam-door_train http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/southern_counties/4163768.stm

I do have a half decent prototype thread in the Swiss Railways section, which includes some comparisons with the UK. Seems to be appreciated by those interested in the contemporary Swiss scene.

Total figment of your imagination and very bizarre given at various times on this thread i have been accused of spreading hate against WCRC and being part of an anti-WCRC mob! When you have calmed down read my post again. Nowhere have I criticised ORR or made any comment that remotely implicates that. I am genuinely interested in comparisons and offered it simply on that basis, as the way the Swiss society does things is very interesting (to me at least) compared to the UK. If it's not of interest to you just ignore it