frobisher

There's no one such thing as "the European version" in regards the class 66. There are detail differences for different batches but UK locos have served on mainland Europe, and vice versa though some differences do put some batches out of gauge for the UK (cab aircon enhancements for instance). By its very nature, the Heljan tooling will provide for a detail version that could be authentically painted as a UK locomotive, but they won't as the UK RTR H0 market is vanishingly small.

All the initial versions are JBs so I'd say not for this version of the tooling.

I dunno, but my experience in the field of prices for professional 3D and CAD/CAM packages is that you probably want to be sitting down when you here the price (typically £2K+ per user seat).

Motorways are only really "busy" around towns they serve, hence the likes of the M25 being a car park almost constantly. The M74 mostly runs from the border up to Glasgow with no intermediary towns of significant size, so it's actually behaving as a motorway should. Now I can attest that the M9 and M8 are busy as anything in the rush hour along their lengths, the M90 similarly with the Forth Road Bridge acting as a significant bottleneck (hence the new bridge being built...). I avoid the horrors of the A1 when going south like the plague. Now take a look at where most of the domestic flights in the UK go to from the London airports... Oh wait, would that be Scotland? This is where a lot of the passenger traffic currently is, and those routes are always busy.

I still shudder at the memory of the Hornby 47's horizontal guide lines dedicated to two-tone green livery. I think they finally altered the tooling for that in the late 80's..?

Possibly not. IF you're building a station astride (say) a dual track railway, surely what you'd do is double up for at least the length of the station, going up to 4 tracks with the outer two being platform loops. Still needs careful timetabling to not stuff everything up of course but you could weave separate stopping services in that way.

Which is also what Hornby did when you look at the service sheets for the 2BIL, which is kind of stupefying.

The Hornby ones did come with a valance I seem to recall, it was clipped to the bogie and coupling though (shudder). We had both a Lima and a Hornby Western when we were growing up, and the Lima one always look better overall (Hornby's paint application was better though (early '80s)).

There's no Kickstarter campaign just yet. I've got a lot of other distractions at the moment (including, bizarrely another non-related Kickstarter campaign an affiliate company is working on) and am still fact finding on certain aspects of this, but it's not something I'd be personally comfortable running myself. It's one of those things that would work best run directly by the manufacturer (certain infrastructure is already in place, and certainly reputation is - people don't know me from Adam in hobby manufacturing) but first a sound case needs to be made to take the risk of running the campaign as there are costs involved there (production of the video, supporting materials, time of those involved etc.) regardless of whether it reaches its target(s) or not. My interest in this is enabling correct roofs for the loco hauled MK3s and their inclusion in future production for Dapol, not to have a little business selling the parts for upgraders. If the Kickstarter campaign happened, you'd place your pre-orders via that in effect. If you wait for it to be successfully funded in all likelihood it won't happen as you're exactly the kind of person that should be pledging support

It wouldn't be £10 a roof in any case, it would be a pledge of £10 which would in all likely hood secure you a number of roofs if the project was successfully funded. Also it's not 1%. £30 is 1% of the tooling cost DapolDave mentioned above. The Kickstarter campaign would need to raise £6K in pledges because you have fees (to Amazon and Kickstarter for the transaction), material, production and mailing costs to deduct from that in addition to the tooling. Kickstarter (and the others...) are crowdfunding bodies. They are about raising capital through donation pledges (not investment - it's very clear about that) to enable projects to go forward. There may, or may not be rewards for pledges of certain levels, and that is why an awful lot of projects now are (successful) pre-ordering schemes for some companies' products. If sufficient interest isn't present, no one in billed, and no obligation to produce the project is expected. Crowdfunding is extensively (and successfully) used by the wargaming and roleplaying hobbies, film funding, computer peripherals, and less successfully for computer games.

How do you figure that? The same land needs to be purchased, the same environmental considerations need to be addressed and the build will take the same length of time pretty much. Those are the biggest components of the build cost and I don't think you'll save as much as you're thinking. When building a new mainline not laying track and catenary to the same standard (or at least easily upgradable to that) of at least HS1 could be viewed as penny pinching and short sighted.

Why not? "Stopping services" are better served on a non-highspeed route surely? You take the majority of the passengers off of those trains who just want to go between Birmingham and London and you don't need to run as many of them (because, let's face it they are the majority of the passengers between those two points), ergo more capacity.

That is generally what happens with a ban, no?

Yes. They should be in a better position to do that than yourself and unless they are going to punt it back out on the shelf again they will need to be talking to Hornby in any case to either get a credit note or fixed/replacement stock.

Cheers Bernard! Slightly less to worry about on that front than I'd feared. I'm currently picking a few experienced Kickstarter brains at the moment on unrelated projects (though related to my business) so I might be able to gauge the viability of this quite soon - I'll report back when I know a little more (and perhaps have something a bit more concrete for DapolDave).

Oooh, here's a thought. Does this mean we now have a "full house" in 00 when these all arrive, or is there a class we're still missing from the Western DHs?

I think that's the point of why they are doing it. The ex-Mainline tooling is getting long in the tooth and can't be easily retooled to represent a 43 correctly. A newly tooled 43 could, with the correct slides in place later cover both the 43 and the 42. There's been a reasonable clamour for an upgraded Warship for a while, and this is a response to it. If the 43 sales are healthy enough, I suspect the replacement tooling slides will be produced that will allow a new 42 to be made to the same standard and the old Mainline one gracefully retired. It obviously will share some components with the upgraded chassis in the current Warship which will have helped reduce R&D time, and I suspect the lower RRP reflects that that the rest of the new tooling is designed around that, rather than the current bodged/altered tooling that may lead to manufacturing complications that a purposed designed tooling wouldn't have.

That's why I mentioned Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com) It's intended for exactly this kind of project, and your back of the fag packet calculations are actually more encouraging than I'd hoped. My gut feel is that an initial goal of £6,000 is where you'd need to be at (there are some fees to come out so income will be about £5,000 ish after fees should the goal be reached) which is 600 pledges of £10 which is not outside the realms of possibility for a KS campaign. Obviously the pledge levels (and rewards) would need to be carefully structured, but if correctly run the campaign will be able to tell you if it's viable through what are essentially committed pre-orders for the reward parts and it will allow the structuring in of pre-orders for the updated tooling coaches as well. If it doesn't hit it's funding goal, then you can point to that result and say "told you so". The "only" investment is the time and effort to run the Kickstarter campaign. Kind of thought that

Am I correct in assuming the major visual difference between a HST MK3 and MK3a is the roof vents? Also, am I correct in assuming that the Dapol MK3s have the roof as a separate moulding (for easy fitting of the light bar)? If so I have the following suggestion for Dapol Dave to consider... Tooling cost for a new roof (or more if you want to cover the buffets) should be considerably lower than for a whole new coach, and the big thing is whether there is demand out there for it. If people are happy enough to go with the wrong roofs, then there's little point tooling up the variant(s). It strikes me as a perfect Kickstarter campaign as you'll quickly determine if there is an upgraders' market out there and get an opportunity to pre-sell some of a next production batch with the updated roofs. Your basic £1 pledge just indicates that you'd like to see them produced, maybe your £10 pledge gets you 3 unpainted roofs (with an option to pre-order more) should the goal be hit etc. You can weave the option to pre-order the updated models into it all as well. A stretch goal could involve tooling up the buffets (and ambitiously maybe the BFO for the adventurous to bodge from the forthcoming TGS?). Whether the goal is hit or not, Dapol will have a very good indication of the level of demand for such an update. Then of course there's the possibility of doing a campaign for producing a CDL-less version (but that's a different ball park cost wise I should think).

Eh? The rakes were in BG for the at least half their life on the service so not that narrow.

Not the case with the Farish range - the Bachmann produced stock all went over to finer flanges quite quickly. A couple of the early Dapol models suffered from flangitis, but that also rapidly got fixed with future batches.

You're saying that like it's not a good result? HS2 is about providing extra capacity. The WCML should still remain as busy as it is now, just that the mix of traffic on it will be different.

We're now getting into the realm of high pedantry. In general, people vote for the MP that represents their party of choice (tactical/protest voting etc aside). This returns a party mix of MPs and this ultimately shapes the ruling party/ies. Only for Westminister elections - some of us get to vote for people AND parties

I don't know the answer, but the Class 395s are capable of 140mph for running on HS1 so perhaps these ones will be similar?

To be as glib in my reply, I'd like to point out that if you ticked any box on a ballot paper in the UK you would have just ruined said ballot paper. Whilst you as an individual may vote for one party or the other, the voting of the nation as a whole led us into the coalition at the last general election ergo we got the government WE voted for.