Pteremy

Interesting - but not very realistic.

Magnetic that looks a like the appropriate coupling style - surely the 'chains' you refer to are for the chaldrons? So a higher fidelity 'Hunt' - in appearance - I guess? Or maybe you don't think that the existing offerings can be improved.

Will you be doing something similar for steam era coaches etc., e.g. the Siphons and Mk1 Suburbans??

There are various photos of the train - 6372 + E140 B Set (Unlined M) (?W6372W)/E148 + 3 Vans in Withered Arm (Barnfield, p37 & text), Huxtable v2 (p389 &90), Rlwy Bylines13/3 (p107 &8) which I believe to be the late running 8.03am T-B (Set 81))(6/60) but the number I discern from Huxtable p390.

When I formally retired 18 months ago i decided to treat myself to a DCC conversion. I didn't want to faff around with hand held controllers and endless CV 'coding' so after some careful research opted for a Z21 and an iPad. I was sceptical about it genuinely being 'plug and play' but it was, literally. Ridiculously easy. If Hornby can deliver that level of accessibility then they deserve to do well.

So, I am delighted to say that I have found a picture of W6372W, one half of Taunton E140 B Set 8, at Barnstaple Victoria in 6/60. It is in unlined maroon. So that's 1 of the 3 sets I have on preorder evidenced (allowing for renumbering). And I can live with a crimson E140 set on the grounds of high probability. So it is only the lined maroon I would prefer to convert to E145, if it is reasonable straightforward to do so. (There is photographic/written evidence of Bristol E145 B Sets 30 & 35, at South Molton and Barnstaple Victoria respectively, in 6/60.)

Don't forget the Dapol Bogie Bolster E - the Bauxite versions only appeared a couple of months ago.

I was never in the market for the Fell, but I dipped in and out of the thread out of curiosity. And I do remember a point, when there was lots of toing and froing about the picture evidence, when I thought, so are people saying it was asymmetric then? At that point I may have lost the will to live because it was only sometime later that I read that was not the case. If the retooled Fell is unchanged that is a real missed opportunity - a symmetric retooling, with some additional 'bodies only' for anyone wanting to improve their first edition, would have created a lot of goodwill. (I am sure I read a magazine review that said that the mechanism is actually rather good.) I think that all this agonising about the KR 'business model' is a bit of a red herring. Most small businesses fail because they do not have all the skills needed to develop and grow a viable business. Isn't that, in effect, the issue with KR, that there are clearly some areas where the skills available are currently falling short of what is needed?

Yes - but that is hardly a unique characteristic!

The website is not clear now - but when I paid (20 months ago) it was £60 for a triple pack (including postage).

Driving Trailers for the Class 121/122 would be a good gap filler (whilst a revised chassis for the 121/122 would be welcome and surely straightforward - just needs a single robust driveshaft). The final few mogul 93xx/73xx would be another good gap filler. Someone is going to do the Class 120 in 00 eventually and it would fit well with Dapol's other products.

Yes. It must reflect a lack of confidence about the reaction they will get to any change in specification. And yet if they said '..we had planned to do X but during development found this would not work so have compromised by doing Y..' I would have thought that there may or may not be much disappointment to the change but a lot more respect for the approach being taken.

What a tease! Are we just talking about the underframe or are there subtle differences between the bodies as well? Other than the underframe differences I have mentioned are there any other material differences, from a modelling point of view?

There is a good official photograph of an E145 on the GWR Org site http://www.gwr.org.uk/b-set-notes.html Comparing this to the Rapido livery illustrations (based on official diagrams) it now seems clear to me that the adoption of 9ft bogies on the E145 required a modified/different underframe. The central truss 'rectangle' looks to be identical. But the slanted truss rods are shorter/steeper (on an E145), on an E145 the Battery/Tool(?) boxes on both sides move slightly inwards, towards the centre of the underframe, and most obviously on an E140 there are spaces between the bogie, dynamo and the nearest battery box, but on the E145 the dynamo is behind the battery box. Which does not answer the 2/4 truss rod point, but does indicate that a E140 to E145 conversion does involve more than just the bogies. But equally it isn't a big deal in the grand scheme of things.

Yes, given that Hornby have a virtual monopoly on entry level OO train sets I can't see them relinquishing that advantage. You may not have meant it this way, but to me 'museum quality' implies something that goes in a display case. That is so far from the truth. The innovation tidal wave that is overtaking Hornby is that established players (Bachmann, Dapol, Heljan) and new start upstarts (e.g. Accrurascale, Rapido) are constantly raising the bar to provide high quality RTR - locos, coaches and wagons - that can be used straight from the box on a wide variety of prototypical layouts. They may make mistakes (as one post pointed out a couple of pages ago) but these mistakes are minor in the context of the quality of the product overall, are admitted to, and are addressed in the next production run. More open communication also means that we get to influence what is produced; we get to understand the compromises that need to be made. Yes, there is a financial price to paid for this increase in quality but there always is - and the market will intervene if it gets out of hand. Hornby have done some high quality models, and I am sure that they will want to continue to do so. But i think that they will struggle to find the capacity and investment funding to compete in both the mass market and at the increasingly sophisticated high end.

Christmas Past - Hornby Christmas Present - Bachmann, Dapol, Heljan Christmas Future - Rapido, Accurascale and similar upstart not so new starts Good luck to TT120 - but I don't see it main-streaming until modellers start using/improving what is available RTR to model something prototypical. That is what got me into modelling in the 1970's - seeing 'catalogue' items pimped up and running on realistic, prototypical layouts, together with well made kits, or scratch builds. The difference now is that we are seeing RTR of a quality and variety that only a kit or scratch build would have provided in the past.

Yes, that makes sense now. So the only remaining issue to clarify (I think) is whether the E145s would also have had 4 truss rods?

Another possibility is that Hornby already know that N is not an undiscovered pot of gold - hence the investment in something different.

It may be your page references but the drawing on page 152 appears to be of the shorter E147, not the E145?

I love all of this; I hate all of this. 'All my life' I have 'known' that E145s were E140s with different bogies. Because that is what Russell (p150, GWR Coaches Appendix v1) said, and was repeated by others. Now, over the years, I have learnt that the Russell books are not perfect. Even so they were the books for me, in the late 1970s, that converted me from someone who enjoyed playing trains into someone who was interested in prototypical reality. So here we are 40+ years later, and despite all those articles on how to improve Airfix/Hornby E140/E145s that never mentioned the underframe trusses, apparently at the point where we now know that E140s and E145s had the same body but significantly different underframes. Phew. If that is where we are. In one sense it does not matter. I can live with the difference, or fettle the difference. But it sort of takes the breath away for the truth to emerge after all these years.

Does the photographic evidence also embrace the 2 lots after 1407 (i.e. 1445 and 1455)?

Thanks - I have realised that my maths is somewhat out - the bogies increased from 7' to 9' and that is an additional 1' either side of the pivot point. So more likely that some repositioning was needed than I was originally allowing for. But worth doing a bit more research I think. Compared with the elderly Airfix/Hornby version it ought to be possible to conjour up some decent E145s out of these with minimal compromise. As Taunton had both E140 and E145 B Sets I will be happy with a couple of different liveried E140 sets as they come. But I would like to fettle one E145 set simply because one was included in the formation of the last train out of Barnstaple Victoria in 1960.

Do you know whether the 'pivot point' had to be moved on the prototypes? I had interpreted the photographic evidence re bogie and coach end as the result of the additional 3 inches on the 'outer' half of the bogie. Moving the centre of the bogie inwards, together with the extra bogie length, might have had consequences for the positioning of the truss rods? I am hoping that this is merely a consequence of the models/bogies used in your conversions. Like you I would rather have the E145 version so hoping it is a simple swap.

Rails saying today (16th) that the reruns are on their way - so looks like they got left off the update.

I have several Heljan locos and they are all excellent runners. The only problem I have ever had was a dud PCB component in a Hymek and they sent me a replacement PCB board free of charge. The 07 is a Rule 1 loco for me, but I hope it sees light of day - despite the comments above it got good reviews when first released.