Hroth

Two bob, eh? Not bad! Though according to the price and inflation calculator ( http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-1633409/Historic-inflation-calculator-value-money-changed-1900.html ) thats equivalent to £1.75 in todays sad excuse for money. It might be interesting to put some old model railway prices through it! I worry about the people in the illustration, they look like they've been ingesting huge quantities nasally........ (But I suppose that the graphic designer didn't have much choice of letraset figures to use)

It probably just depended on what was to hand at the time, although the one you illustrate would need a fair amount of pre-transmission preparation! And that Squezy is post 1971 as its decimal priced!

In those days, the BBC had a VERY strict "non-commercial" attitude to mentioning products on air, so common craft materials were renamed and trademarks obscured. The following materials were commonly used in Blue Peter craft projects: "Sticky-backed plastic" was code for Fablon (still available to this day!) Cereal boxes were usually Kellogs cornflakes boxes with logo and text rubbed off with wire wool Squeezy bottles were Fairy Liquid containers similarly treated Match boxes were Swan Vestas (large) or Bryant and May (small) similarly treated. The usual glue in those pre-PVA days was Copydex latex glue, with brown paper stuck around the container to obscure the manufacturer. And there was no thought to the health and safety implications of using discarded cardboard toilet roll centres! Colour was usually applied using Reeves poster paints, usually in a little glass jar with a screwtop lid of the contents colour (again with the label obscured). I've still got some of those in the attic, though the contents dried out long ago! Nowadays, you'll get an itemised parts list, I suppose....

An OO gauge version would be ideal to accompany a collection of Heljan class 15, 16 and 23 locos, probably awaiting attention..... My Heljan locos live in a run-down setting occupied by a Metcalfe 2 road steam shed and a Hornby diesel depot, obviously an attempt at "modernisation" in the early 60s!.

The pic does come up when you google for it, but the website it belongs to appears to be dead. I did find a rather fetching pic of Valerie Singleton, wearing only what appears to be a towel. It was in an article by Peter Purves in the Daily Mail about the sort of things he used to get up to on the programme..... Sadly there wasn't anything about the train set.

There you go, just the sort of thing I was thinking of to run the H&P Peckett on! So how many layouts are in the planning stage now?

Depends on how long you leave a stationary 12v loco on a DCC layout......

Its all down to age, taste and managing the market. At least we won't see Pecketts being flogged in Aldi! Although I'm surprised there hasn't been an attempt to sell a cheap trainset like "Caledonian Belle" through Aldi as a Christmas Special item. The price that Hattons are offering at present fits well into their demographic! They'd shift a hell of a lot of boxes that route and might even make a nice little profit, as well as raising the profile of model railways.

I suspect that the McClown won't be gracing a Peckett any time soon, although heavily applied dirty weathering with loads of claggy grease wouldn't be completely out of character! However, we might get a "Thomas the Tank Engine" face for the obligatory "Heritage Railway Thomas Day" train pack.....

That one looks like it deserves to be dunked in a mug of tea! When the first batch of Sentinels (Cattewater, NCB, Tarmac) came out, a sad little Hornby class 101 called "Sentinel", from many years previous, showed itself. Almost as confusing as the 9F called "Cock O'The North" which was current just before the real 2001 was released.......

I ended up doing roughly the same thing with the Sentinels, though as the Peckett is rather more expensive than those little beasties, my collection may well top out at two (Dodo and the H&P).....

Oh, come on chaps! If you can't justify a loco like the H&P Peckett on your main layout, just pop down to B&Q and get a chunk of ply and some timber battens, build a small(ish) baseboard and with a couple of points and a couple of lengths of flexitrack you can have a layout for it to shuffle around. A bit of work with some low-relief card kits (many are available!) and you can get a nice little factory environment to keep it company! There's no need to become a collector.....

And I got such a nice letter from Hornby a couple of weeks ago inviting me to renew my subscription. Perhaps they haven't had many renewals over the past six months...

And the wheels, and the splasher, which seems to be a similar shade to the cab side. Of course Hornby seem to have the same "green wheel" problem with the LNER livery B12... I'm just glad I don't need an Adams Radial, though I occasionally waver because they are so pretty.

A Peckett, a Sentinel and perhaps a pack of suitable wagons for each. All in liveries that will stay unique to club members and at prices that make it worth being a club member with a voucher. Thing is, they don't have to have a huge variety of items, just stuff that people will want and not reliveries of generic trainset stock. Problem is that if they have this stock sitting on the shelf, turning over relatively slowly, then when there's another panic the beancounters and stock checkers will sell them off to the retail sector to raise some wind, like the Hornby 2016 Hopper, etc, etc.

My last issue* of "The Collector" arrived this morning. Hornby are keeping up with the excellent reboot from the previous issue, 52 pages (inc covers) including pieces on: The S&DJR Simon Kohler on the future of "manufacturing in China" The Peppercorn K1 in model and reality The North Yorkshire Moors Railway Renaming/renumbering your model The Dover quayside railway The "Queen of Scots" Train No. 488 - A Survivors Story Young railway modellers at the Elgin MRC Plus the usual Juniors Section and product information. There's also a list of proposed release dates for the rest of the year, though some are dodgy - the Peckett and the B12 are listed for 16th December... Overall (first impressions) 9/10! * Unless something occurs to encourage me to renew!

Run with XP rating post-war, and you'd probably end up with corned beef hash or cream cheese! Seriously, as fitted stock, would XP be permitted as empties or when not carrying livestock?

The other thing is, its reasonably priced and with mucky brown weathering, who's going to say which company it belongs to?

Thats modern "phonics" spelling for you! (The spelling is correct and I think we all kno what was meant so there's no point in getting into a spelin war...)

That's the pragmatic approach. But for the folk who worry about such things, they'd know it wasn't "right" and they'd fret. Ok. Now we know there's some niggles, what's it like from a 3 foot viewing distance? I'm thinking it'll DO.

The current equivalent of Connie/Nellie/Polly/No27 type "freelance" industrial locomotives seems to be R3496 and its ilk, which are loosely based (I believe) on a small class of South Wales colliery locos. They serve the purpose for which they were designed, small cheap rugged toy locos to play trains with, that don't completely lose touch with what a loco looks like. As for the "memory of the Polly", R355 in its various forms lasted in the catalogue for 10 years, from 1961 to 1971. It was the sort of thing produced over half a century ago, and I have fond memories of that little 0-4-0... The Pecketts, like the Sentinels, are something completely different, far more sophisticated in terms of detail, livery and mechanicals, that don't look out place on a model railway. It would be nice to see Hornby produce some Train Packs of both classes of loco, together with a trio of suitable wagons as a showcase of what they can do if they put their minds to it.

The theory is that as its presented in an "artless" manner on a blog, then its more real than a product photoshopped to within an inch of its life or blitzed under studio lighting. We also know that its part of the prototype sequence and that audience comments in places like RMWeb are a useful way to obtain feedback from a different perspective, we're not as close to the product as they are! I've a feeling that although The Engine Shed is presented as being "a blog written by the Hornby developers themselves". its firmly under the control of Marketing. Of course, poking at the exif data is lots of fun, and reveals that the images did pass through Photoshop, only if even to resize and crop for web use as a Canon EOS 7D MkII must produce stonkingly big source files! I think the "Origin" details are generated by Photoshop and a reminder that if you're going to publish images on the web its probably a good idea to pass the image through an exif data remover, or at least manually remove sensitive data! Given the image sensivitivity, the exposure time and aperture, it also suggests that the camera was on a tripod and either in Manual or Aperture Priority mode so the images are not just a collection of quick snapshots. Finally, although I don't know much about the Canon DSLR range (the only Canon camera I have is a G11 Powershot), I think the camera itself lies in the serious amature/semi-pro segment of their market. Its not a cheap body!

That MSC liveried Peckett is jaw-droppingly wonderful. I'm glad to see that the plastic wheel centre colour matches the body colour, unlike the gharstly green ones on the B12! And the size comparison with the 50p... Do we get a magnifying glass in the box to see it? Rovex: My layout is nowhere near Reading, but the H&P one is on order so the pulling power must be phenomenal!

Hurrah! But why is the LNER version a week or so later than the BR versions? Boo!

If concessions stock is returned, then it would probably be in Hornbys best interests to transfer it to smaller retailers at advantageous rates that are equal to (or even less than?) those that the big retailers got. For example, even though Hattons have shifted some lines completely, they are still offering many models with stock levels at "more than 10 in stock" and so will probably not take as many in any subsequent offering so the stock will need to be spread more widely. Hornby might also have to let the smaller retailers have the stock in lesser quantities, ie one or two rather than by the case. I know of one concession that bailed out before all this emerged into the light of day. I visited the shop after Hornby withdrew their stock, the amount of Hornby stock was a miniscule fraction of that available previously and I think that this is a reflection of stock availibility in most of the smaller retailers. Hornby do need to do more to support this retail route or they will vanish from the high street completely. Going back to the trumpeted popularity of the Flying Scotsman in the report, it looks like that might be based on the quantity Hattons took off their hands. R3086, R3250 and R3336 are all listed as "more than 10" in stock each.... edit for odd typo (or two).