64F

It's good to see EFE buses making a comeback after a lengthy drought of releases.

And some more.

Luckily I've got it with me at work as I'm going straight to my club this evening. Apologies in advance for the quality of my photos. Despite talking of the quality of the livery application yesterday there are small blemishes in the red/white stripe on each of the blunt end cabsides, and no doubt others will notice other things I've missed, but generally I'm happy with it.

Just opened my Intercity one. Very nice, with good sharp livery application. I still struggle with the fact that that the prototypes are now at scrapping age though!

That OVV517R is a real oddball - a mk1 with a home-made mk2-esque front grafted on. The number plate placement is a bit niche too...

Heljan have already done 86426 in its slightly unsatisfying retro livery (rail blue with white windows) - it never quite looked right to me, possibly because the yellow warning panels were too large, and the different shade of blue patch which the E3195 numerals were applied to grated somehow That didn't stop me buying it in model form though! I'd like to see more of the IC variants too, but maybe not all at once - months with Heljan releases can be pricey! As you say 86502 was the only 86/5 to get General markings but several other 86/5 briefly wore unsectorised RF. The first few 86/6s repainted into RF in 1989-90 received General markings - 86602, 86613 and 86627, maybe one or two others (?), but subsequent repaints went straight into RF Distribution. (Personally I'd prefer Heljan to avoid 86602 and to instead model it as 86402, the final 86 in rail blue).

I imagine they'll work through the remaining 86/4 and 86/6 liveries first and then modify the tooling. For the period of my WCML models (1988-91) there were still the last of the BR blue examples, two main syles of IC Mainline/Swallow (full yellow front style and half yellow front*) with various lettering variations, the original Parcels livery and Railfreight General. *edit - on reflection, I'm not sure if any 86/4s got half yellow front IC Swallow as they were being converted to 86/6s by that point.

86401 wound up in the Parcels sector and in due course received RES livery. Prior to that, the pairing of NSE loco and Royal Mail red stock was a particularly eye-catching combination.

At the risk of unpicking at an old sore, our club has a large apprentice-piece representation of a mk2 carriage, ex BREL Glasgow Works, painted in ScotRail blue strip livery. It normally lives on a high shelf, but at the moment is down from this due to redecorating so I took the opportunity to compare shades of grey to some models. The warmer grey used by Bachmann and Hornby is a good match, whereas Oxford Rail's shade is completely wrong. If it was the case that the Oxford Rail used the official BR colour then presumably Glasgow Works were applying Railmatch! Hopefully there will be another run soon, with the colour corrected.

My three packs came last week - 9 wagons and 8 loads. A friend in my MRC bought one pack which arrived a load short too. No doubt KR will send out replacement loads in due course. Other than that small niggle, I'm very happy with them and the price is fantastic value for money by current standards. Roll on a Westinghouse 9F...

Fantastic announcement! The ScR's four celebrity locos have got to be collectable so I'm sure it'll sell well. (My vote is for the Glen next...)

I don’t think anyone has ever made a VAL/Harrington, and don’t be giving Oxford any ideas about it – it’ll only result in a set with overscale movie-specific opening doors on the back and a triplet of Mini Coopers! Maybe you are thinking of the OOC Plaxton Panorama, of which a VAL version was available? I think coaches are poorly represented by the RTR manufacturers. The Oxford ones are lovely, but they mostly choose rare heavyweight types as favoured by a few large fleets rather than the much more common lightweight and dual-purpose types. EFE and OOC seem pretty dormant at the moment. It’s a shame because I think coaches are extremely collectable (see the continental H0 offerings from Rietze, Holland Oto and AWM).

My parents used to rent theirs from the Co-op, and as TVs of those days always seemed to be on the blink the repair man was often out. I seem to recall a smallish van (Escort sized) in the usual blue/white co-op livery of the 1980s. The Trackside Bedford HA would do as a starting point, maybe with a bit of extra lettering added: https://www.hattons.co.uk/stocklistdatabase/22646/lledo_dg209005_bedford_ha_van_in_co_op_blue_white_livery_/stockdetail Trackside also did a Morris Minor van with Co-op Television lettering: https://www.hattons.co.uk/355764/corgi_trackside_inc_lledo_diecast_vehicles_dg211000_po_morris_1000_van_co_operative_non_limited_pre_owned_like_new/stockdetail

Covered in the separate topics on the GER vans and the LNER banana vans. All due very soon I believe (Jan-March 2022).

I don't like placing pre-orders I'm not 100% sure about in case the retailer gets stuck with stuff I've cancelled that they can't shift. However that wouldn't be a problem for the Caprotti I suppose, as it be Hornby's own problem. Perhaps this week has just got even more expensive.

I'm always very sceptical about the details provided in these release announcements as Hornby have a track record of vague announcements (i.e. giving the purported and not always accurate 'era' rather than describing the crest), and changing the crest or the loco number prior to release. I seem to recall the K1s were all renumbered in that way, as the initial announcement included a Scottish Region one which was eventually produced as an NER example instead. For the new Black Five they have muddied the waters even further by using the same picture for all three BR models and pointlessly photoshopping the numbers onto it (even though the image is of a completely different type to at least one of the locomotives modelled and if the differing 'eras' listed are to be believed the crest is presumably wrong for at least one of them as well). It wouldn't surprise me if one or both of the Walschaerts ones comes out as late crest and the Caprotti gets "British Railways" lettering. Given the importance of pre-ordering I really think that Hornby should make more of an effort to explain exactly what they are inviting us to buy. That description of a Caprotti Standard 5 on their website is the icing on the cake! (That said - yes please!) I've held off ordering the Caprotti until I at least know what livery it is to be in.

This is something that really frustrates me about Hornby's coaching stock offerings too. Year after year they churn out lovely ECML express passenger locomotives with nothing for them to pull. Even when the intermittently produced Gresley vestibuled coaches are available you can't make up a convincing rake of them because there are too few types and some important types are missing. A restaurant triple, a BTK and a CK would allow a reasonable approximation of the Flying Scotsman and various other major expresses. Add a sleeper third to allow night trains like the Aberdonian. A locker composite would be nice too. They could churn a different named train out each year, with various livery options. I'm delighted to see the Coronation (and have ordered a set), but it is niche.

I see the painters ran out of ice blue before reaching the bottom of the insulfish wagons again - did anyone ever find a picture of a wagon actually carrying such a livery? Its nice to see some lettering variation since the first run of ice blue ones, but its hard to understand why they would carry forward the white bufferbeams.

Rapido do high quality 1:160 buses for North America so I think a 1:148 Leyland National would be a winner, given that the wrongly-scaled Farish bus range was such a disappointment.

Were the internal partitions fixed, or did they just slide in loose between the pallets? I'd assume the latter, in which case presumably they would have been laid flat inside the wagon when it was empty?

Three years after the first batch came out and still there has been no LNER livery except the very early and shortlived "L&NER" lined black, and no BR late crest. I'd been hoping we might see some more mainstream liveries for the J36 in the 2022 announcement, but if the 2019 announcement's aren't expected until 2023 then the prospects don't look great.

How did collieries receive their explosives? The explosives works at Penrhyndeudraeth continued to dispatch GPVs for the NCB into the 1980s so presumably these were being delivered direct to the collieries, or perhaps to central magazines in the mining areas? (Edit - sorry, already kind of answered in The Stationmaster's post above)

Some quarries certainly used to receive explosives by rail, as seen in this image of a railtour at Bogside (Fife) in 1980: See also https://www.railscot.co.uk/locations/B/Bogside_Fife/ showing there were two vans in the siding and stating they were for a nearby quarry. This was the old station and the vans were in the last remnant of the goods yard, as opposed to Bogside Colliery (down a spur to the right beyond the bridge).

Do we know how much variation the Fleetline tooling allows for? (e.g. different front panels/windscreens/destination panels?) My impression is that the model is specifically a WMPTE one and the only variation is between the early and late versions with different front indicator positions, but few if any other operators took this specific style new. Plenty of other companies operated secondhand former WMPTE examples in the deregulation era through. It would seem unlikely that Rapido would invest in the tooling for such a high quality model and then confine their releases to one fleet only. That said, it seems like a brave strategy to release all those WMPTE/WMT-liveried ones in one go - anyone who collects that fleet is faced with over £1000 if they want them all! I'd have thought it would make more sense to spread the West Midlands releases over a couple of batches mixed in with some other operators mixed in. (Western Scottish for me please!) I seem to recall that about ten years ago EFE announced they were developing a D/AD-type, but nothing more was heard of it unfortunately. They were delivered to several BET Group and independent fleets as well as being one of the main SBG types, and were all much the same in appearance apart from updating of the front panel over the years, so fingers-crossed someone will do one eventually.

Yes, that "light green" looks nothing like green. That said, the prototype didn't look terribly green either, though any pictures I have seen of it show a far lighter shade than Heljan's artists impression, but perhaps it had faded badly. It would be interesting to know Heljan's source for that shade. http://www.scot-rail.co.uk/photo/scaled/23151/