Rule 1 Applies

It is your model railway and you can run whatever you like on it, in any livery you like, in any era you like. Some railway modellers choose to slavishly copy the past to the nth degree of detail, but nobody should tell you what you should and should not do. Model railways should be fun, not about abiding by yet more rules. We have enough of those in life as it is. If you want to run a GWR railcar in chocolate and cream in any era, go ahead. Do it and enjoy yourself. The police have plenty enough to deal with, they won't come checking what's happening on your railway blush

Wow - who proofed that? 😮 'Tonbridge' (Should be 'Tunbridge Wells'. Tonbridge is a completely different town a few miles up the road). 'Spa Valley' (should the 'the Spa Valley Railway'). 'ducketts' (should be 'duckets'). 'In fact, you can see where the SR version had the lamps removed as lamp brackets have been included on either side of the model.' (if this is true, why do all brake vans have sidelight brackets? I'm sure most modellers know). 'Hornby’s regular Development blog' ('development' shouldn't be capitalised). 'Brake Vans' and 'Brake Van' (should be 'brake vans' and 'brake van'). 'Please remember that as a decoration sample it is far from the finished article but it should provide you with a solid first impression of what you can expect.' ... and ... 'We do like to show you as many models as we can before they are released and one such model is the R3760 GBRf Class 59 looking particularly appealing in the bright GBRf corporate colours.' (Breathe.... BREATHE...!) That's not all of the mistakes, by the way... Before any Hornby fans start piling in on me, accusing me of being picky and saying 'it doesn't matter', it DOES matter. The Internet is a written medium and, if you are going to use it to professionally represent a company, get someone who can write professionally to proof-read everything. Hornby wouldn't promote products using poor quality photographs. So why should the company accept poor quality writing? Or, to put it another way for the layman, if it's OK to turn a blind eye to poor quality words, it should also be OK to turn a blind eye to poor quality numbers. Remember that the next time you are overcharged for something... 😉

A face (and everything else) that only a mother could love. Before that particular aberration, a Bugatti nose P2 would be infinitely preferable.

It needs to be followed by "... but we'll be back on Thursday, when John and Shep will be on a sailing ship, Pete will be meeting a troupe of morris dancers and Val will be checking the totaliser for the latest you have raised in the Great Blue Peter Bring and Buy Sale". Sorry, it's an age thing...

I've been using IPA for decades and, frankly, I'm surprised that it'll clean anything. Although it can be a very effective lubricant, especially on a sunny afternoon. /media/tinymce_upload/e6515a1473e24f62f54560fdda6cab37.jpg Anyone from the 'we all assume everyone knows what we're talking about' in-club care to explain to a part-time railway modeller what IPA stands for in this context?

You can bet someone will moan when they find that vast piece of Yankeeness won't go round first radius curves 😆 The wheelbase of the tender alone is something else. (Yes I know the loco itself was designed to articulate, before one of the self-proclaimed experts gives me chapter and verse!)

Something I find really interesting in this thread, which is very relevant, is the number of respondees and their post counts. There have been seven different respondents and - apart from morairamike and me - the post counts (at this moment) are 2248, 6192 and (to me, an astonishing) 9026, 10453 and 18975. Why is this important? Because it (a) illustrates the (small) scale of your audience here and (b) that there is a tiny minority which has the time to spend visiting and posting thousands of times, others who only visit occasionally and ... and the vast majority which does neither. If you want to make a success of a business, it's the latter group you need to harness. With no disrespect intended, no matter how much time and inclination those with thousands of posts have or how much you're on first name terms, they're still the same few people. That tiny minority is simply not going to spend even a picofraction of what is needed to keep a business running. Even with the likes of rmweb, there may be more people there and they may shout louder, but (despite what it'll have you believe) it's still a minority of railway modellers. The rest of us have a gazillion other things to do and can't necessarily spend a lot of time roaming internet forums on the subject. I know that many people are put off all railway-related internet forums simply because finding the real nuggets of wheat that they are interested in amongst the deluge of chaff and ravings of the hardcore, tunnel-visioned nerdinista is too difficult to bother with.

You're asking too simplistic a question. You haven't given any information about how you ran and promoted your 'business experiment', so it's impossible to judge why you only got 3 enquiries without knowing more. I suspect that the answer will depend very much on whether a 'small shop or trader' engages with the 21st century and promotes the heck out of its business using every possible avenue available to it, or whether it just sits there and expects people to find it. It also depends on exactly what it's offering, services, prices and so on. 'Build it and they will come' may have worked 30+ years ago, but the world has moved on a long way in a short space of time.

Ah, you see? Like I said in another thread, having a broad palette of knowledge is a good thing 😉 This is an old game for me - I write for a living and sometimes entertain myself by seeing how many references to a particular subject I can get in before I get rumbled. The more unusual the words, the harder (and therefore the more rewarding) the game is. Helps to break up the monotony of frequently working stupidly long days. Dear Hornby. If you want any really obscure ideas for next year, you know who to call 😛

They're not named in the sense you're thinking. They have the names of fictitious indstrial companies on them.

Whoever it is in the Hornby design office, please make it stop! Recently had locos with the identities of three members of Marillion - (Steve) Hogarth Stone, (Steve) Rothery Industries and (Ian) Mosley Tarmacadam. Now we've just had announced (Steve) Wilson Paper Mills, (Craig) Blundell King Timber Merchants and (Nick) Beggs Tooling (well at least the last one's apt). It's not big and it's not clever. (PS: Unless whoever it is has the decency to use the names Gabriel, Hackett, Rutherford, Banks and Phillips next year (let's not bother with Collins), I'm going to relentlessly hunt them down and make them stand on a street corner in Margate wearing a sparkly cape, a flower mask and with a double-neck Shergold neatly inserted up their jacksie!)

+1 Very few people have the gift of being able to ad-lib well. Planning makes perfect.

I can see both sides of this particular coin. I don't think there's anything wrong with showing support for someone and I understand that the motive is out of kindness, but equally I don't agree with attempting to use guilt as a motivating factor to try and push others into supporting them. Does the video poster want people to watch his videos because they genuinely enjoy them or does he want people to watch them effectively because they feel sorry for him? Although well-intentioned, isn't the latter more than a little patronising? Personally I have neither the time nor the interest to watch people take model trains out of boxes. But if the chap making the videos wants to carry on making them, then I fully support his choice and wish him well. However, just because someone happens to like real ale doesn't mean they should accept feeling pressured into liking or supporting every other beer drinker. The same is true of model railways (and any other pastime). This rather tribal "you're either with us or against us" mentality displayed by quite a few people who like railways (both real and toy) is something that I have never understood.

I think this is actually quite an interesting area of psychology because, while I don't take the hobby terribly seriously (life's too short and, as you say, it's supposed to be fun) I have my own 'rules'. We all do, from those who strive for absolute historical and prototypical accuracy right across the spectrum to where the only 'rule' is that there are no 'rules'! For example, I do like to base my running very roughly in 'reality', in terms of the time period at least, even though my layout is in a completely fictional place that could never in reality have existed. For me it's not about copying the real past, I'm activaly creating what I would like to have seen in an idealised past! So in my fictional location I don't have a problem with a green Deltic on Mk1 Pullmans passing a BR green SR EMU, but the EMUs have third rails and you will never see a high intensity headlight, a pre-nationalisation or post-privatisation livery. Or indeed a road vehicle from the 1970s or later. That's what I like most about this hobby - you can create your own reality and that reality can be whatever you want it to be. Nobody can tell you that you're 'wrong' because, as my username implies, Rule 1 is that it's yours and you are completely free to do whatever you like with it, no matter what anybody says. Do whatever you enjoy! 😆 (By the way LCDR, I wan't mocking those who 'want to set rules'. However, I was mocking those who get terribly self-important and disproprtionately upset - to the point of comedy - at those who don't, sneeringly dismissing their efforts as 'just a train set' or slagging off pastimes that they they don't happen to themselves enjoy (like dismissing football as 'just 22 men kicking a bag of wind'). It is these people who need to learn the meaning of the expression 'live and let live'. Model railways is only a hobby and, again, it's supposed to be fun. I deliberately refer to it as 'toy trains', because I think a bit of self-deprecating humour does one the world of good. I know that when someone earnestly retorts "Oh no, it's not toy trains, it's model railways" then they are the sort of person with a sense of humour bypass that I am unlikely to want to have a pint with).

Chuck anything behind any loco, take some photos, post them on RMweb and sit back and take great pleasure in enjoying the sheer idiocy of how much it upsets a whole lot of people who really should get out more 😆