phil-b259

Thats RMweb for you. But it’s also what makes it an interesting forum to a degree - more human and less robot like if you will.

Seeing as I carry round a photo ID driving licence in my wallet all the time (and no I’m not going to the bother of putting it in there every time I am going to drive a motor vehicle - nor waste my time presenting it at a police station because I got stopped driving while not having it with me) then, yes I am ‘OK’ with that possibility as you put it. That assumes whatever regime is put in place doesn’t have a procedure to deal with that - maybe something like you have two weeks to present yourself to a Police station with your ID, which is exactly what happens if you cannot produce your driving license when stopped by the Police when driving a motor vehicle.

Apparently that is mainly due to South Korean ‘K Pop’ band who shot a music video there a few years ago. ’k pop’ fans tend to be fanatical in their devolution to their idols and apparently many make the pilgrimage to the Severn Sisters / Birling Gap to get photos - which usually includes them standing perilously close to the cliff edge and jumping up into the air…. Given the unstable nature of the chalk cliffs this is a very unwise action - there is a reason why the National Trust say keep back from the cliff edge. The other thing these visitors had a tendency to do was offer £50 notes to pay for bus fares in the pre-covid days (the frequent bus service between Brighton and Eastbourne now having gone cashless) which caused no end of issues. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/world/europe/seven-sisters-cliffs-tourism-pictures.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4982586/amp/Sightseers-taking-pictures-Seven-Sisters-cliffs.html

There are 4 Travelodge hotels very close to Kings Cross / St Pancras and 3 Premier Inn hotels in the area too. Naturally it being central London they are a bit more expensive than you might be used to but they do at least take the guess work out of things in terms of what you get for your money.

The platforms at Ashford have been modified to be compatible with UIC stock (Network Rail got a grant from the DfT to do it) - just in time for the Pandemic to hit and all Eurostar services from Ashford be withdrawn. Ebsfleet and St Pancras have been compatible with UIC stock from the outset - Stratford may be compatible if the temporary modifications applied to them during the 2012 Olympics are removed. But more widely, its true that the traditional UK platform profile is incompatible with UIC gauge stock and whats more making it compatible is likely to make in non compatible for UK gauge stock! And its not just platforms that are an issue in the UK - things like shunt signal, signs, bridge parapets / girders etc are also foul of UIC loading gauge. This caused problems with HS2 which was originally supposed to feature a mix of UIC and UK gauge trains calling at stations along it - the proposed solution being to include retracting bridging pieces on the UK gauge stock to remove the big gaps that would be present as a result of having to simultaneously accommodate the wider UIC gauge trains at the same platform. (Now that a certain party has have slashed HS2 to bits there is no need for it to accommodate UIC gauge trains so the platforms can be adjusted accordingly)

Indeed there has - a couple of Kernow products spring to mind but these required immediate payment typically at the time the models left the factory - waiting till the model arrived on the shelves / ready for dispatch at pre-order prices wasn't an option. But such policies are quite different from the general honouring a pre-order price from 5 years or so ago (which with the gestation period of some models from Bachmann and Hornby was a real posability) right up till when the models reach the retailers shelf - and they are only possible because the hit the retailer takes on the profit margin is considered acceptable. I've pretty much exclusively bought steam models - including from the likes of Hattons, Rails & Kernow with none of them explicitly guaranteeing to honour pre-order prices with no strings attached. Sales of model railway items tend to be on a small scale volume wise so as a business strategy its still a stupid policy in general terms to guarantee to honor pre-order prices come what may. In reality such policies only makes sense if the business is 99% certain the price they have to pay the manufacturer etc won't go up (or go beyond a certain level) as that eats into the profit margin and can easily lead to the retailer making a loss on the sale. Do that too many times and it can cause serious financial problems for small traders (if you are someone like Tesco or Aldi then making losses on individual products doesn't matter too much because the loses get dwarfed by the profits).

Every single retailer I have bough from since re-entering the hobby well over a decade ago HAS NOT 'guaranteed' pre-order prices! What they have said is that if the price goes up (i.e. the manufacturer has raised the price they charge the retailer before delivery) then the retailer will allow me to cancel with no penalty. If Hattons had such an absolute pre-order price guarantee then thats plain stupid business practice - its only a sensible practice where the manufacturer is also able to guarantees to never to raise their prices they charge the retailer or the retailer is able to lock in the manufacturers price at time of ordering.

I’m not missing the point - but the bottom line is that to move the pellets on the rail network they need real wagons! No wagons - no fuel - no power generated = massive losses. Plastering the sides with adverts is this incidental - seeing as they have to be painted anyway. By contrast they manifestly do not need toy trains to generate money nor attract dither business. If they need additional marketing material then branded pens, golf balls, keychains, usb drives, etc are much easier and cheaper to procure, plus far more likely to be used / picked up by the intended audience than toy trains.

That rather misses the point that the real wagons were required for business purposes - regardless of whether they were covered with colourful ‘advertising’ type liveries or mated all over battleship grey. Toy trains by contrast are not something which is needed for business purposes and as such are a completely different thing to new wagons.

Again, just because something is a ‘waste of time’ for you personally does not mean it is a bad idea for business as a whole. Rails prime motivation is to make as much money for its owners in the most efficient way possible - and if it means it loses out on a few overseas sales or overseas sellers end up paying more due to the use of the e-bay platform then it is obviously a trade off they consider worth paying.

That is no doubt one of the significant reasons, but not the only one. Of course it also takes two to tango as it were and as this was an orderly wind down of Hattons and not an insolvency then the owner of Hattons may well have been selective in terms of who they were prepared to let the name go to (I.e.avoid someone buying it then trashing its reputation). Granted, as Graham Muz has said, this is all speculation…..

Because they can! (and their shareholders like it that way) Its called capitalism in action….

EXACTLY Anyone who thinks that this new body is somehow going to be able to escape from doing what Whitehall / Politicians / Civil servants tell it what to do is living in cloud cockoo land…..

Agreed - though I doubt getting access to a set of databases and website domains is the sole reason Rail’s went and bought it though! If they were minded to do something different / venture into new initiatives then having a well known brand name to hand to use would be an advantage….

Doesn’t stop them setting up such a subsidiary in future if they wanted to though does it? Thats not to say they would do of course - but what Rails say publicly is not necessarily the full story (and rightly so - businesses have the right to keep their inner workings confidential)

One advantage of keeping manufacturing as a distinct subsidiary is that if it ran into trouble it won’t drag down the parent with it. As such we could be in a situation where AndyYs claim the Genesis tooling has gone to Rails is sort of right - but Rails are also correct when they say they are not a manufacturer and haven’t bought it. I.e. the tooling remains owned by Hattons but Hattons is now a subsidiary of Rails.

Kernow seem to have done alright by being a manufacturer! I get the impression it’s not what you do (I.e. being a manufacturer) it’s how you do it (not being seen as a direct threat to the big boys) which matters.

Drax are a power generation company not a toy manufacturer and there are a lot cheaper ways to create advertising than commissioning toy trains (as they would see them) - particularly as consumers cannot by energy directly from Drax in the first place. Besides with this controversy https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68381160 hanging over them keeping a low profile as far as the public is probably a good thing right now.

The only way I could see the ‘free’ Trunk system working (without customers effectively paying rent on the space used to store goods before dispatch) is if it was strictly time limited - and by that we are talking a matter of a couple of weeks rather than months. As for shipping options and dealing with customs / VAT in house - that’s a lot of extra hassle and cost for a retailer to deal with - yet the whole reason why buyers want it is to reduce what they have to pay….. Sorry that’s not how it works - you want the retailer to do more then you are going to have to pay for it through higher, not lower prices….

costly for who whom? E-bay might well be more expensive for you as a buyer, but for a business owner it actually makes lots of sense because all the hard work and cost of keeping the sales platform secure / up to date in presentation terms is dealt with by someone else. Don’t underestimate the work required to provide a reliable and slick online looking sales portal….

That’s what I’m hoping for its more than a little annoying Dapol haven’t provided any images of decorated samples - in contrast to the 1st batch.

https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/st-pancrass-station-planning-for-more-international-passengers-70852/?fbclid=IwAR10umYmZp5LmrC_cmlBC5G7XVTBmRJO-o1LUjJUa9LsuTVtdoVE9RcZfX4_aem_AYNDH2Vv6EUnECcLd8V022p9NyoWI7j7qOVd7zZ8ag74QXjvNaJPu1xpG74jw13HN48 It will be interesting to see what the bidders for this come up with…..

The last time they did that it resulted in severe flooding up the Cuckmete valley inland (driving along the A259 was more like going across a causeway across a lake) with many of the fields and important marsh environments ruined by being left underwater for months as insufficient water was flowing out into the sea due to the build up of shingle across the river mouth. There was much anger and objection to this turn of events - with many people rightly sending that the environment agency’s motives had nothing to do with ‘letting nature take its course’ and everything to do with saving money!

IIRC the tooling for these is an actually owned by Drax (as they paid for it) and not Hornby (whose involvement was just to produce the design and then deliver the models). If so, Hornby themselves cannot simply undertake a further release off their own initiative - they need express permission from Drax to do so. Moreover I’m anlso pretty sure that Drax themselves would want a cut of the profits from the sales of each wagon too! That in turn pushes the RRP even higher and it could be that the price the wagons would have to be sold at is so expensive Hornby believe they won’t sell.

Indeed Far too many folk fail to appreciate that the biggest cost for pretty much all RTR model railway stuff is the amount of assembly required - NOT the cost of the parts themselves. So if you have a basic wagon which is made up of say two injection moulded parts which simply need clipping together, wheels and couplings added but has a top notch paint job with lots of Tampo printing then yes, removing the decoration will make a big difference to the amount of assembly time needed and thus the cost of production and would in theory allow for a lower RRP. However if your wagon is made up of many parts and requires lots of separately fitted detail then the simply omitting the Tampo printing won't actually shorten the assembly time that much and as such any cost savings that do result will be tiny - and that translates into only a small reduction in RRP. Rapidos wagons are very much in the 'high detail with lots of separate fitted parts' category so I would say anyone who thinks there is scope for them to be offered unpainted with a significant price reduction is very deluded.