paul_harness

Way back in the mists of time when Hornby announced the loco, no-one had heard of HM7000. They said it would be DCC, plain & simple. Our current setup is using a laptop, railmaster and an elink with an old ipad; this has worked well, up until today. Now it has arrived, we find the loco has an HM7000 decoder. So we need an ipad with compatible ios. Now we have to buy a new ipad that is compatible with the Hornby DCC app; major expense. But that will mean running 1 loco using the new ipad and the rest using the old ipad. So that now means getting a bluetooth legacy dongle to allow them all to run using the 1 new ipad; more expense. But that doesn't fit in an elink. So to get it to fit in a compatible controller, it means buying an elite; more expense. So this 1 single loco could prove to be almost as expensive as the whole layout has previously cost. PLUS it proves how much loyalty Hornby show to their previous products (now that they no longer support railmaster). How long til they realise they've wrung us dry yet again with HM7000 and come up with a new wizard wheeze to rip us off? And why has it taken TWO YEARS from announcing it to actually getting hold of one? Disgusted. Yet again.

Highly underwhelmed.

I ordered 5 sets of the R7398 Buckeye Magnetic Coupling Packs, as I have 4 rakes of mk3 and 1 rake of mk4 coaches. Hornby describe them as "perfect accessory for Mark 3 or Mark 4 coaches and thusly any Intercity 125 or 225 consist". They didn't fit ANY of the rakes of coaches as they've obviously designed for NEM couplings. It was only on contacting customer (slow to) care that they said the couplings are for NEM pockets, but there's nothing in the tech specs of the product description. Surely it's not beyond the realms of sense just to put something in the tech specs? Or are Hornby simply trying to play the numbers game and sucker us in by not giving full details?

I trawled through various posts & spotted a couple of people had similar issues with ISPs allocating blocked IP addresses and the solution being restarting their routers so a new IP address would be allocated. So I tried this and "hey presto", we're now back connected to the Railmaster website (and therewith the help function). Without an offline help facility, we've been wandering in the dark. The suggestions that support emailed were of no help.

For the last week, when starting up Railmaster on my son's laptop, it no longer connects to the Railmaster website. But it still connects with the elink. This means without the internet connection my son can no longer use handheld devices. The Railmaster help is also not functioning & Railmaster support aren't responding to emails. Not aware of any laptop changes and Railmaster has always been allowed through the firewall (just check it still is). Windows 11 Railmaster 1.74 Any suggestions?

If the Azuma goes beyond this coming Christmas I'm cancelling. Sick of the wait.

It looks like it'll miss 2021 Christmas as well last year. HOW LONG?!!!