HonestTom

What pops up on your feed is nothing to do with Sam, it's automatically decided by the YouTube algorithm. Presumably you entered something in the search box along the lines of "Somerset and Dorset Railway," the AI gave you a result based on that. The AI has no way of knowing that you personally aren't interested in a video about a Hornby train set. It just knows that other people have entered that search term or similar and that this is a popular video among those who did so. As for whether this video is clickbait, it certainly is not. The title of the video describes exactly what it is. The thumbnail depicts the train set that is being unboxed. I'm not saying that Sam never indulges in clickbait, but this isn't it.

I don't know how useful this is, but I thought it was worth at least mentioning.

Are you fair game if you don't make money? What about if you don't set out to make money, but wind up doing so anyway? Speaking as someone who's been on the receiving end of some extremely unpleasant abuse for such heinous crimes as not talking about autocoaches and not mentioning the North London Railway, I'd like to know whether I should be upset or not.

The cylinders are a huge improvement.

I have mixed views on the guy myself. I do watch his videos when the subject captures my interest. My big bugbear is that he seems to base his reviews very heavily on "quantity" of loco, i.e. how heavy it is, how big it is, how much detail it has. His reviews aren't much use if you're looking to determine how accurate a model is, which is a major consideration for me. I do take them with a pinch of salt. I'm not a fan of his "stunt" videos either - I don't really care if he's built a loco that can go at a scale Mach 1 or that can go underwater or whatever. I don't have any interest in a Top Ten video, because I think every model needs to be judged on its own criteria - you can't fairly compare a starter loco or toy train to a top-of-the-line scale model. The less said about "El Cheapo," the better. But as a YouTuber myself (on nothing like the same scale as Sam, and nowhere near making a living off it), I do feel that I have to play Devil's Advocate to some extent here. People in general seem to be a little bitter about the fact that it's possible to make a living off YouTube at all, especially if it's by doing something that's not to their taste (see also). But the fact is that he's producing videos for an audience who appreciate his work enough that he is able to make a living off it. That audience isn't people like us. It's a younger audience, perhaps newcomers to the hobby, presumably people who are looking for a nice loco rather than something specific. The train set crowd. If you don't like his stuff, then there are plenty of other YouTubers who are likely a better fit for your interests, who have been mentioned before in this thread. On a side note, I kind of feel like the term "clickbait" has lost all meaning these days. The video describes itself as Sam's worst trains of 2020 and that's what the video is. It might be attention-grabbing (which you kind of have to be on a huge platform like YouTube), but it's not clickbait.

Thousands of rakes of old Hornby 4-wheelers that finally have an end vehicle?

There's the one at Kew Gardens, which the LSWR built to take advantage of the fact that the actual gardens lacked refreshment facilities. .

This one? I've found that layout a real inspiration. It shows how much you can do as a beginner without a whole lot of tools and a massive budget. To this day, I sometimes play around with modifying and repainting cheapo wagons just as an exercise.

Bellerophon definitely has my interest piqued, as a fan of Victorian industrials.

If you want to add some relief to the sides of the containers, you can order corrugated paper very cheaply online. If you look on YouTube, there are lots of tutorials on how to build containers (they're a popular scenic item for wargamers). This one is for larger than 00 scale, but the principles are much the same. In general, I would thoroughly recommend looking at wargame scenery tutorials, those guys do a lot of budget stuff that's really effective and often very simple.

If it's inaccurate, then I'll feel less heretical about buying one and scraping "NORTH" off the sides...

I have some Bachmann coaches awaiting repainting into LBSC livery, but had the Hornby announcement come sooner then I'd probably get a rake of theirs. As it is, I could use some pre-Grouping coaches for a planned freelance layout set in the Port of London in the late 50s. Historically, the London and Blackwall Railway had very tight clearances, such that Gresley Quint-Arts couldn't be used. So I was thinking I'd get one of the Hornby brake coaches in BR (E) livery and a Hattons 4-wheeler in LNER brown to represent some beaten-up pre-Grouping stock pressed into service as a passenger train. In reality, such trains had long since lost their passengers to trams and buses, but I just like those oddities.

I've often thought that they could make a few quid by producing a second, flat roof moulding for the short clerestory coaches. People have been bashing the clerestories into pre-grouping Southern coaches that way for donkey's years.

I feel like one or both manufacturers could do well offering coaches in a generic livery for modellers interested in freelance companies. Perhaps a beaten-up brown or maroon livery with some faded numbers. They've done similar with some of their other stock in the past - several of their clerestory and 4-wheel coach releases haven't included company identification.

These ones look quite LBSC, which would fit the Isle of Wight.

I do find this whole situation very curious. I want to assume good faith, but it seems so odd that two manufacturers should both release generic pre-Grouping coaches so close together, when the received wisdom has long been that the market would only accept accurate stock. I don't want to get into the tedious debate over accurate versus generic, I think that was exhausted in the Hattons Genesis thread. I guess one advantage of this is that if you want to run trains from more than one company, at least you can mix and match so you don't get the same train twice. Your generic LBSC coaches don't have to be identical to your generic LSWRs or whatever. Personally, I'm thinking I might get the BR Eastern Region coaches because, by an astonishing coincidence, they fit the needs of my planned freelance layout perfectly.

Unfortunately none of the liveries are really suitable for me, but this is a very welcome addition to the stable of industrials. Maybe I'll wind up buying one and pretending it's just been acquired from elsewhere.

My hobby is constructing enormous food and getting real people to pose on it.

People could buy one of each and recreate the Condor.

For me, the big problems are the wheels and the couplings which, as @The Johnster noted, have a tendency to droop. I have a few Dapol wagons and with weathering, they look fine next to more detailed wagons.

You could try Tebee over on Shapeways. He does various loco bodies to fit the Kato chassis, albeit many of them are freelance or stretched to fit the chassis. If you can live with that, they're pretty inexpensive.

I'd agree with this. For me, when I was a kid, I just wanted to run cool express locomotives. As an adult, I've found that my interests have altered the way I indulge in model railways. I've become interested in other creative hobbies like painting and theatre, and I love historical research. As a result, my model railways now are more about creating atmospheric pictures of a place and time (even if that place and time is imaginary). Express locomotives don't interest me as much, I'm more enthused by quirky industrial engines and grimy wagons.

I wonder if the name "Jock" is a reference to Graeme Green's book 'The Little Train.' The Flying Scotsman appears in that book under that name.

On a fairly plain, slab-sided engine, I think that livery might not look totally awful. But the class 08 family has so many rectangular sticky-out bits that the pattern is totally lost. It just looks like a Smurf threw up.

The engine is just fine, but the paint job...