PeterStiles

So we have a new Rails website, as I see you can all tell. I had to go through the create a new account - I couldn't just log on with my details from last week. Good: Presumably because I used the same email address as my prior account, it shows my existing pre-order. The rest of the account details tho' seem missing, there' are no Addresses and (i'm not about to place an order just to see) presumably no credit card details. In fact I'd be worried if there were exiting credit card details there. Website looks good so far, I like the way it looks a lot like the old website... I'm a fuddy-duddy like that.

Oliver Cromwell is begging to be purchased...

The annoying thing is that I'd been thinking, as retirement planning is starting to play on my mind, that I'd love nothing better than to run a Model Railway Shop when I leave all this office work behind... Bother,.

I don't expect John Lewis to be in Tier 1. Why would they need to be? I don't see them wanting or needing to be able to take pre-orders of stock or to worry about the sort of things we're concerned with here?

Era 12 eh? That'll now make me seven eras old.

My SQ11 just turned up... I cannot agree with the comment that the instructions are very clear... I quote: Not quote got to the bottom of how this works yet... p[

Due to the World Wide Shortage of peco-sourced products before xmas I ended up trying my hand at 3d designing some seats to pimp a couple of 4-wheelers I wanted my terrier to pull without feeling completely embarrassed. Yes it does require access to a 3d printer (thanks to the lovely lady for a 50th birthday present) and I'm pretty amateur at this, but I was able to produce something just as seat-like as the aforementioned seating kits, which I could customise to the width of my coaches rather than slicing as you do with the kit. Please don't hate me for my crimes against modelling (or the use of a Hornby 4-wheeler), but applaud instead the vaguely creative use of modern techniques! Pictures show that I built the 3d models in the freebee software you get with Windows10 and then the resulting unpainted bits just resting in a "coach" before painting/gluing.

Well, this is the posted reason why the Hornby also sell the terriers as DCC fitted. So I'd suspect if they sold a small enough adaptor themselves I would suspect it would be dearer to buy them separately than just using a pre-fitted one... Now a DCC sound pre-fitted Hornby terrier.. that'd get my wallet moving.. But there's no way I'd try to squeeze something in myself.

Oh alright then. We're really just worried that we'll lose some of the Greatest Forum Posts Known To Human Kind....

Do we feel that this website was underpowered compared to the prior one? So that all of us eager beavers clicked on the link to read the Engine Shed and Whoosh there it went? Strange thing is that the web site seems to be written in a CMS tool (concrete5 I think I saw in some meta data) which means that bugs shouldn't happen unless they are simply related to the data. Having "the wrong pictures" up and bad categorisation of the stock is expected, but the web site being able to count how many items in an Era (three pages at 12 a page... but only 24 items in the category) should be sorted at the base framework level. The Bad Gateway errors are just reprehensible.. And I'm glad to say someone has notice that Era 3 was being represented by a BR loco and has replaced it: Oh well. I've got a web-site to install a major update on this weekend and I really hope mine goes better than this debacle.

Definitely "not yet production quality" if you ask me at the moment. If this was tested by my team of crack System Testers I'd have expected there to be more things working on the day it went live. I dread to think of how many JIRAs are outstanding on this. Some of the selection criteria seems incorrect on some pages - which is probably just bad data set up, but giving the option of filtering by "locomotive" (which returns 1 result a B17) and "steam" (which returns 18 results not including the B17) seems just.. bad data. I also like the way that it gave me a picture of a BR-marked H-Class for "Era 3"... The "Out now!" page ( https://uk.Hornby.com/catalogue/out-now?page=1 ) is full of things that are marked as "Available to pre-order"... The forums are taking for ever to convert, but then I'd have expected that to take some time, we've got some long conversations on there. We want it done right.... For instance - if The Duke's main thread gets lost I may never buy another thing from Hornby again...

There's a pic of Class 66 Captain Tom Moore hauling a set of (I believe) these hoppers in CEMEX livery. It popped up whilst I was searching for suitable rolling stock to go behind one. Might have to order one or three of these.