MarkSG

Here's the latest version of the unofficial show guide. If there are any last minute corrections that anyone wants me to make I will have time to update it this afternoon, but otherwise this is probably the final version. unofficial-warley-2023-v2.pdf

Well, maybe because we can't always be certain we're going until closer to the date. Personally, I think that the idea of having a cut-off at all on e-tickets is a bit unnecessary anway. Obviously, back in the day when buying advance tickets meant getting them posted to you, then advance sales had to close far enough in advance for the postal system to do its job. But when the ticket exists solely on your mobile phone (or printed off by you at home), then there's no reason not to allow purchase even on the day itself. It would significantly reduce queues at the ticket desk and get people into the venue more smoothly. I'm not sure, though, whether the cut-off is a feature of the NEC's ticketing system, or whether it's a choice made by the event organiser. If it's the former, then obviously nothing can really be done about it. If it's the latter, then I'd urge the Warley organisers to drop the cut-off next year and allow online ticket purchase right up to closing time. I do also agree that if there is a cut-off, that fact should be clearly stated on the ticketing system itself, not just elsewhere on the show's publicity. Again, I don't know if that's a weakness of the ticketing system, or if it's under the control of the event organiser. But, either way, it's something to consider for next year.

It's not entirely dissimilar to at least one of the layouts on the Great Model Railway Challenge 😉

I suspect that part of the issue is that the NEC is a professional exhibition space and is set up for professional exhibitors. At the vast majority of NEC events all, or nearly all, of the stands will be trade stands staffed by organisations who are themselves regular exhibitors at such events. So the exhibitors will know how it works, and have a good understanding of the process and the timescales involved. Warley is unusual in that it has a large proportion of non-professional exhibitors, who don't normally attend events in that kind of setup and therefore don't always know what to expect. If you're more used to taking your layout to a church hall or a leisure centre then the NEC is likely to be challenging! I've never been an exhibitor at the NEC, for Warley or anything else. But back in the day when my dad ran his farm machinery business and did a lot of the agricultural shows I used to help out with that, and the issues were similar. Basically, you have to trust that the venue operators know what they are doing and are doing their best to facilitate everybody getting on and off as efficiently as possible, but they can't (and won't) give priority to someone who thinks they can jump the queue by shouting louder. I've sat in a van doing the crossword while waiting to get access to the stand, and it can be infuriating when you were hoping to be on the road an hour ago and you haven't even loaded up yet. But it's part and parcel of the job, and people who do it for a living know that. It's the people who don't do it for a living who tend to struggle with it more.

That's precisely the kind of useful information which will be included in the final release!

As promised earlier, I've spent a bit of time putting together an unofficial show guide that people can download and print off, given that there won't be an official one this year. It's very rough and ready, I haven't made much effort to make it more presentable, and it's likely to contain errors so please don't rely on every aspect of it! Here's a first draft, I will do an updated one by the end of the week if I get any corrections or additional information: unofficial-warley-2023.pdf

That's brilliant work. I particularly like the ones where the lettering is practically invisible. Although I model early BR, I've bought one in LMS livery with the intention of doing something like that, the aim being to portray a wagon that hasn't yet found its way into the paintshop. Do you mind sharing what paints/tools/techniques you've used to do that?

I don't think the complaint is about the design being used. As the original post says, it was deliberately released for free, so there's nothing to stop anyone using it. The point seems to me to be more about the fact that someone is charging more than a tenner for something which, if you've got a 3D printer, costs only pennies to print. Having said that, I don't think that's a justified complaint either. The tenner isn't the cost of the materials, it's the cost of the time and effort involved in converting the design to a physical product, as well as amortising the cost of the printer. That's entirely reasonable; in the vast majority of manufacturered products the overheads massively exceed the cost of materials. I bet there's only a few pennies worth of plastic in a typical RTR wagon, as well. But it's not the plastic you're paying for. I do agree, though, that it is very, very cheeky to use the designer's own photo to publicise the product. The seller could at least have made one and taken their own photo of it for the listing. Using the original designer's photo gives a misleading impression that the product is in some way authorised or approved by him, which isn't the case. If it was me, I'd be inclined to complain to eBay about the use of the photo.

I'm thinking of taking the train all (or almost all) the way to Warley this year. Even with a change at New Street, Worcestershire Parkway to BIH is significantly quicker than my door to door driving route from home, and that's before taking into account roadworks. Although driving to Parkway first, rather than driving all the way to the NEC, does result in, at least theoretically, a longer overall door to door time from home to the NEC, I suspect that a fair bit of that will be offset by a shorter distance from the station to Hall 5 than from the car park to Hall 5, and if the traffic is as bad this year as it was last year then the headline time of using Parkway for park+ride will be quicker than the real world drive time. That does, though, assume that the trains run on time. Given that I'll have to be going on the Sunday (as I have another event I need to be at on the Saturday), that may not necessarily be guaranteed. So I probably won't make the decision itself until that day, and I'll check the departure boards first before deciding whether to drive or ride.

Although anyone with any statistical knowledge will be familiar with a normal distribution (aka a bell curve), the reality is that most real life scenarios don't follow a normal distribution. And that affects the concept of the average. Because - as, again, anyone with any statistical knowledge will be aware - there are three different averages: the mean, the mode and the median. In a normal distribution, all three of those will be the same. But in any other distribution, they won't. So you need to choose which one you are referring to when you talk about the average. In the case of RM's long-gone strapline, I think it's pretty obvious that what they meant by "average" was the mode, or typical, skill set among modellers. Which is clearly a good place to pitch a magazine, because that's where you'll have the largest potential readership. And it seems to have worked. Of all the magazines I can remember from my early days in the hobby, RM is the only one still around (and, for that matter, the one I read at the time, because I, too, was an average, or typical, modeller rather than having the esoteric skillsets addressed by some of the other mags). But these days, "average" tends to be interpreted more often as meaning the median or mean, which is a much less useful metric in this context. So the idea of the "average modeller" is also probably less helpful than it once was. "Typical modeller" would probably be a better way of expressing it.

Because most of us have been around for more than 29 years!

Having done a bit of research (at this rate, I'm going to end up convincing myself to buy one!), Par Harbour had (and still has, although it's rarely used now) a normal loading gauge connection to the mainline. But, as well as the connection to the outside world, which carried normal harbour traffic in a variety of wagons, it also had a direct connection with the Par China Clay Works the other side of the mainline, accessed via the bridge in the photo. The only connection the works had with the outside world was via the harbour, so all traffic to and from the works had to go under the bridge. So yes, that bridge is the reason for the height of the locos, because as well as doing normal harbour shunting duties they also needed to be able to make the trip to and from the clay works to bring the clay to the harbour and exchange sidings. Although the rail connection to the clay works has long gone, the bridge is still there and visible on Google Streetview: https://maps.app.goo.gl/wXZv7SvcjZUutRoT6

Yes, one of the biggest weaknesses of the Shapeways marketplace is the absence of customer reviews and ratings. While these can be gamed and distorted (as Amazon and Tripadvisor have found), they can be very useful to consumers. It's one of the key metrics I use when making purchases from eBay, for example. While there's no meaningful way to rate an individual second-hand product, the seller ratings are invaluable. I won't buy from a seller which has a history of poor reviews and ratings, and it would be nice to have the same option on Shapeways.

Probably not to the same extent. But I bet a lot of us use setrack in the fiddle yard, or on the non-scenic section, or on a test track. I know I do. My test oval is setrack. For sections where appearance doesn't matter, it's a lot quicker and simpler than laying flexitrack. Plus, of course, I wouldn't be at all surprised if a lot of us have got an unprototypically tight curve somewhere on our flexitrack! Rule 1 applies, particularly when you need to save space. So an equivalent to radius 2 setrack is a good rule of thumb for how tight we can go, given that that's the target for most RTR locos and rolling stock.

You can run Rule 1 over the maroon coaches in several different ways. One is that the maroon coaches exist in the Titfield universe, in which, yes, the line was subsequently brought back into BR ownership having proved to be profitable after all - not least because the introduction of onboard catering helped encourage usage! Another is a hypothetical real life scenario in which the Kelvedon and Tollesbury continued in passenger operation until the late 1950s, so after filming was complete the coach was returned to service on the K&T with internal modifications that BR simply couldn't be bothered to revert, given that the coach was already obsolete and due to be scrapped soon anyway. A third is that maroon is what they would probably be painted now if in use by a heritage railway, and a heritage railway would be likely to want the option to run a Titfield version. I'm sure other people can come up with equally plausible scenarios!

I've found an early colour photo of a gunpowder van making a delivery...

I had never heard of these before today. They are certainly among the most weird looking locos I've seen. Fortunately for my wallet, I don't think even Rule 1 would stretch far enough for me, but it will certainly be interesting to see what other people do with them.

Yes, very much so. The brake van in particular would be a welcome addition to any eastern-themed layout. Ex-GER brake vans were quite widely dispersed across the network in LNER days, and many of them lasted into BR service. So they meet two of the typical requirements of a model manufacturer: widespread geographical use (meaning that you don't have to be a GER modeller to want one), and lengthy service (meaning you can make them in multiple liveries across different eras). Sounds like a no-brainer to me 🙂

We have to bear in mind that we're not the only market for manufacturers. The collector segment - the people who buy models primarily to put them in display cases, and who think that the value of a second-hand model is determined by the condition of the box as well as the model itself - is keen on more detail, because, unlike us, they will tend to spend more time looking at the models close-up. I don't have any problem with the manufacturers addressing that market; anything which supports a healthy industry is, ultimately, good for all of us. Where it does possibly become an issue is where a focus on the collector market prices out the other end of the market, the train set buyers who just want something nice to run and don't care all that much about fine detail and the state of the box it came in. Because we, and the manufacturers, need that market sector too; for us as hobbyists it's a common route into the hobby and for the manufacturers it's a source of mass-market sales that isn't so quality-sensitive.

Give that there won't be a show guide this year, I thought I'd see if we could crowdsource one. I've put all the basic information (essentially, names and stand numbers) that's already been published, either here, on the website or on social media, and then made a Google Sheets document out if it. The idea is that if you know enough about a layout to be able to write a short description of it, you can add that to the spreadsheet. I've done a couple myself already and I'll work on others over the next few days, but most of the layouts aren't familiar to me so I obviously won't be able to do it for all of them. The document is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LI2lhPPP4ci0nO-G-LuEht-csO5je1WUbuWXE7HP3Sw/edit?usp=sharing It's open to anyone to edit, so please be mindful of the fact that it's a collaborative work and refrain from changing what other people have contributed (unless it's to make an entirely non-controversial edit such as correcting a typo or a factual error such as the wrong scale listed for a layout). What I'll then do, a couple of days before the show, is format the data into a PDF document that can be printed off. It won't be a full show guide, and you'll still need the floorplan for it to be properly useful, but it will be better than just a list of names and more acessible than needing to refer to a website while in the hall.

So is my Titfield one. I'm still dithering about getting a pair of faux-BR livery ones.

Here's one of two W&U carriages sandwiched between a G15 and what I presume is a brake van. You can see how muh lower they are than both the loco and the van.

They probably poll low because consumers assume (rightly, it seems) that the manufacturers will keep churning them out anyway, so there's no particular reason to wishlist them.

Someone appears to have misspelled the name of the designer of the "Booster" on their website 🙂 https://www.Bachmann.co.uk/product/category/887/sr-bullied-booster-cc1-sr-green/e82002

Based on responses here to previous announcments, I think I can confidently predict that what we'll get is too much of something, not enough of something else, they'll carry on ignoring the most obvious choices, and the prices will make everyone's eyes water.