frobisher

I think too many of us may be looking for a controversy where there probably isn't one. Arran of Realtrack has stated that there is no licensing agreement in place between EFE/Bachmann and Railtrack (who own the tooliing that was used for their models - And I don't blame Arran for making the clarifying statements, because the silly ideas will otherwise take root as "fact" given time. There are a range of solutions to that puzzle that do not require anything nefarious going on but outside of those actually in the know, these are purely speculative.

I would suspect that Realtrack's margin is slimmer than for their own runs because they aren't taking the risk of carrying stock in this instance. Rapido might not of course be directly involved IF Realtrack own the tooling, but their factory may well be being commissioned directly by EFE/Bachmann and Realtrack getting royalties. But all of this depends on commercial information that we're not privy to. In any case, all the commercial risk is on EFE/Bachmann pretty much. [Edit] It would appear that Realtrack didn't enter into a licensing agreement with EFE/Bachmann so this tooling may or may not be the tooling used by Realtrack. At this point anything else is wildly speculative, and is down to the commissioning arrangements for tooling, who actually owns it etc.

Johnson and Johnson (no relation) Sam and Ella

Probably a bit longer than it would take to hunt it down and sink it... Nothing quite like an attack to expose a submarine.

But you need new stock to cover the increased services... If you move the Pendolinos off of the route they were designed for, you'll need to put slower existing stock on to replace them,

40 roughly. The Swansea scheme is listed as 320MW, your average UK nuclear power station is around 1200MW. There are much better ways of doing tidal power that doesn't require barrages of course, and I seem to recall there are environmental concerns around the Swansea scheme. Tidal barrages have an issue of course around slack water. Meanwhile the following scheme is going through planning up here ... West of Orkney Windfarm which is a 2GW scheme where the wind flow is pretty much constantly available. Now, if you start putting the type of tidal turbines that EMEC have been trialling up here as well in amongst that wind farm you can neatly supplement that...

It's mostly to do with the batch production system. No longer do they just run one or two of a loco type to keep it in the catalogue but with limited choice, now they run larger production runs every few years with larger numbers of variants; Across those 3 Dapol steam locos, there are a total of 23 variations. [To be clear, Hall, Schools and 9F] So whilst a particular loco type may not be showing in stock at Dapol, your local model shop may have many more. Dapol have produced a lot of different types over the years and are rerunning them reasonably frequently. There's a batch of Britannias on the way for instance. But there's a lot more out there than there ever was in the old Farish/Minitrix days.

No idea, it's just what they did. At the time nobody expected a re-tool because they'd only relatively recently warmed up and improved (a bit) the Lima tooling. Hornby seem to have done well enough out of the newer tooling though so who knows.

A bit of counter evidence was Hornby had a full run of the Limby 67 they year before announcing the in house tooling which wrong fitted a lot of peeps.

But in any case, Hornby have sold/pre-sold their entire run so job's a goodun as far as they are concerned.

It appears that Electrarail do decals in N gauge, but not 00... https://electrarail.co.uk/class-739-1695-p.asp

Probably not as it's the wrong sort of 73 :(

It's a 100+ mph cleared trainset, and your choice of loco is rather limited there. The 67 is a little harsh on track where as the 68 is a much more evolved 67 that is more gentle on track.

The demand for Evening Star is way greater than the demand for DP1, plus one is a single member of a large class and the other is exactly singular. One is a "bread and butter" locomotive type, and the other is not. Hornby did previously abort a new 9F when Bachmann brought out theirs I seem to recall (Bachmann were much further along, and hence we got the Railroad warmover with the loco drive), but all kudos to Hornby for coming back on it eventually.

That was in the 2022 announcements; The motor bogie is moving to the guards compartment where it always should have been (the VEP has probably the biggest of the MK1 EMUs, you could hide an elephant in there, the underframe is being replaced by a cast metal one for extra weight and elimination of the traction tyres.

That would be somewhat suicidal of Accurscale to try and gazunder Hornby at this stage, for the cost of tooling DP1 up, there's so many other locos they could produce with a larger potential market.

Nope - the only RTR 63' ones at the moment are the Replica ones. But you never know, Accurscale are doing some rather gorgeous looking 56' ones, so they might follow those up later with the longer ones.

It's really not going to work though as the NEM pocket is so far below the headstock and isn't necessarily fixed relative to the headstock. You'll end up with some really awful Z shaped device coming from the NEM socket, up in front of the headstock (and definately not attached to it) that might foul the buffers...

Probably less so as they should bow under gravity. But any rigid coupling at NEM height isn't going to look right for all cases, if at all. The NEM pockets are at bogie level, nowhere near headstocks. That said, still looks better than tension locks for fixed rakes.

Mind you, it's particularly wrong in the example photo, it would look better on buffered stock that was more closely coupled... and you'd then not notice the absence of the coupling at buffer level.

Except it doesn't have Railroad or Railroad Plus in the listing. The lining shown is very much not at the Railroad level.

The only one I can see is this ... which isn't a Railroad release and has full lining etc. So she'll be fine but will have some moulded detail. By all accounts she's a great representation of Tornado but as such is not representative of the original Peppercorn A1s.

Not really comparable. Bachmann's 47 tooling isn't for a single prototype, but pretty much all prototypes of the 47 so is a very complete set for those variants. DP1 is a singular protype, with no meaningful variants tooling wise as I understand it, so based on information released by others total tooling and R&D are circa £125K.

And of course we have the 1st Anniversary Edition of the Dublo DP1 coming up next year too...

43002-55 should all have been delivered with guards office in place, no exhaust deflectors 43056-123 probably also the same 43124-198 would be to the revised spec with no guards office plus roof exhaust deflectors delivered 1981+