frobisher

Indeed "We haven't killed anyone yet" is not a great H&S policy statement.

The weather has a greater effect to be honest. Weather here in Orkney was fine, but the weather elsewhere has caused one of the liners not to stop here today. That's 2,500 tourists that didn't set foot here today. But 1,400 tomorrow and 2,500 on Wednesday still coming. The big winner there is of course Orkney Harbours with their berthing fees... The Jacobite doesn't really move that many bodies around, and is more concerned with making income for WCR rather than Mallaig etc.

Passengers...

Only if you air cool them... closed circuit liquid coolers aren't exactly unknown technology within gaming PCs.

Er, the pictures from Tornado point towards contents that would happily sit in an mini-ATX case that they have made a big cupboard to house. A simple bit of lateral thinking solves the problem. You have a tender with lots of water in it. Take your equipment, place it within a watertight metal box which you use as a heatsink, place it at the bottom of the water tank and you'll lose say, 2 gallons capacity and have all the passive heat dissipation you need.

Er, such a beast already exists and is in the MK3 derived EMU stock surely?

Or glad of the week off... Well actually no, the number of people who come in on the Jacobite compared to the normal drive in tourist trade is tiny.

Looks like the suspension springs are not integral to the bogies on this unlike the 86's :)

Of which AS make 3(4?) already? They'd however be more welcome hitting the 64ft non-gangway stock... And maybe its EMU derivatives.

77 surely..? Now that has Euro appeal...

We know that already, Heljan were pitching at a £199 price point for their 31 as against say £125 ish where the Hornby diesels are. I suspect much of that was down to Heljan going down the route of detail used for their 00 models rather than Hornby's more "Design Clever" route.

The fact that Heljan got as far as they did with the 31 indicates "8 years" might be overly pessimistic, I suspect the other manufacturers are taking stock of a) Hornby's development pipeline timescales first and b) the uptake of the scale. Duplication this early in the game is exceptionally counterproductive. Heljan were unfortunate to have been pre-empted with the 31, but they are probably well set up to get one or more of a 20, 25, 26, 27, 33 or maybe even a 24 to market within a 24 month timescale if they had the confidence to do so.

There's actually quite a bit of possible synergy. Scenics and buildings in particular.

These almost look ready made for the Caledonian Sleeper service it must be said, should new traction be sought in the next few years though I think there might be a problem on the West Highland line with the RA... So maybe not on that route.

I'd suspect not; They're listed as 86 tonnes but with 4 axles, and the 37 is 100 tonnes on 6 axles so maybe RA6 rather than the 37's RA5.

Probably accurately scaled MK3s might be a better starting point ;)

The decision to produce the 2e and the 2f simultaneously was a "because they could" rather than "because they should" decision. One or other should have been left as a tooling option that could go to production later, because at a casual glance 90% of modellers wouldn't see the difference between them, we effectively end up with a double size production batch of a coach type that has no appropriate locomotives to be pulled by available at the same time. If rather than double down on the MK2 they'd scheduled more livery choices for the MK1 instead we'd have curiously missing blue grey and chocolate and cream versions we need to cover the locos that are planned. As it is, we'll never be short of MK2 aircons (no bad thing in and of itself).

Quite probably, BUT you'd have lost one of the driving vehicles completely to the necessary 3000+ HP of generator.

But as I said, what's with the MK2 e AND f..? That's a couple of production slots that could have been used for other coaches, say a pair of Gresley gangwayed stock, or Blue Grey MK1s which are conspicuously absent at present.

Yet doubled down on the MK2e/f... when one or the other would have been more than sufficient at this stage of the game. More MK1s will always make sense.

I'd have thought they were more closely related to the Class 210?

And the buffers of course...

I was just going off of what the press release said, in which the Locomotion models under the Railway Icons branding would be those in the as preserved condition in the National Collection, and that exclusively with Rails would be in service variants from that tooling. If you look at the production partners associated with the Railway Icons range, the possible answer presents itself if they head down that path.

The Locomotion models are only of the locos in the collection as preserved, the Rails side of the collaboration is for in service versions and variants of those prototypes, so there may well be a follow up announcement down the line (and then we can get all the livery variants over the years...)

That'll be what we'll be seeing from the Rails side of things most likely. The Locomotion models are "as preserved".