KT

Thanks for your reply. Your work looks excellent and I am always extremely pleased to see people keeping these locos running and in good condition. I also have the 4mt (well - several) and it is very much my favourite. Currently in the throws of the DCC conversion, which is quite daunting! Nearly there. Just the chip seems not to have the guts required.

Can anyone tell me the best colour to match the Wrenn 2-6-4 BR Black late crest? It's more of a very dark gunmetal than black truthfully, but I'd like to touch up some light paint flaking and from experience I know that there are frustratingly many 'black' colours. Any advice gratefully received.

Hornby want the additional level of margin that comes from cutting out the retailer. But, they haven't geared up their sales to handle the additional work involved in fulfilling the role of the retailer. Particularly for a model that had a lot of demand. As time goes on, assuming they survive the growing pains, they will learn where they haven't been prepared and will react and improve. It's growing pains of dealing with a (relatively) new role for them. Also, shifting boxes to retailers, the retailers can get messed about endlessly and just have to 'put up with it'. They want the models. Individuals are massively less patient, or understanding. Again, they're not used to dealing with people that can talk back to them.

For my money, many of it's issues source from the flangeless rear wheel set. The weight has been cast forward to try to stop the flangeless wheels causing problems with fouling/shorting. Which presents poor weight distribution, which loses adhesion on the driving set and pushes too much weight on the front wheel set for it's own good. Articulated pony trucks / bogies are less prototypical, but so is absolutely everyone's layout - as regards radii. Articulated pony trucks were around for about 60 years, for a really excellent reason. They work properly.

Well, to be quite fair, I think he has genuine aptitude for his design for 3D printing. He turns out a technically good video, and is relaxed to camera. Only when he comes across as treating companies significantly iniquitously, and repeatedly so, do I end up getting seriously irritated.

A mechanism that basically didn't work, and Sam gave it 4 stars. That displays Sam's absolutely relentless bias in favour of Hornby and against Bachmann at its most ridiculously obvious. If that was a Bachmann it would have been a 1, or a two, and laced with endless bitter, puerile jibes about "Bachmann tax". Whilst I like the idea of Sam's channel, and the service he could do for promoting the hobby, the subtle but extremely relentless bias, is quite ridiculous. The model he reviewed was criminally poor and should have been portrayed as such in every way, and in no way what ever did it deserve to score better than any model that performed properly. Particularly performed well, on a carpet.

Well yes, I understand that point of view. But, his channel directs a great deal of people, and therefore money, toward, or away from, the products he reviews. If it is based on nonsense, personal bias - or worse, then it is somewhat damaging to manufacturers. And most unfairly.

What I don't understand, is that Sam makes endless comments that evidence an entire ignorance of extremely basic economics and the costs of manufacture, together with what seems to me to be a mild vendetta against Bachmann, and the behaviour of an 8 year old; scooting his toys down the carpet. Yet the comments section seems to leave him largely unscathed for his manifest failings. Does he spend 8 hours a day deleting extremely obvious, and quite justified, comments?