Yeldarb

This morning I took delivery of a BR 9F with Westinghouse Pumps and it is a nice model. The thing that struck me was how small it appears in comparison with the Gresley / Thompson / Peppercorn 4-6-2s I have. In my mind's eye I imagined a locomotive of the size of Hush-Hush, whereas it is more Gresley V2 in size.

The fact that the current sale also generates loyalty points only makes the situation worse. The £169 price for the model on sale in my original post would generate an additional £25 loyalty point discount on top of the £70 already mentioned, taking the total discount to £95. Whilst this represents a (relative) bargain for someone, it makes the £37.50 loyalty bonus discount for pre ordering at the full price seem rather paltry.

I decided to add to my collection of locomotives after a lay-off of a few years. I was attracted by the price of the P2/2 Thane of Fife as a club offering. The 15% point award for each purchase took the sting out of the interesting prices that models are going for nowadays. My last purchases were of locomotives of the Gresley Collection and at the time I thought that £124 was quite steep. Anyway, I joined the club and I am stockpiling hobby points so that later this year I will be able to pick up a loco for effectively half price, so making up for having paid full price for all the others. The reason for this post is disappointment over the reduced price of the W1 currently on offer in the Outlet Sale. I paid full price for the loco just a few weeks ago on 6 July, with a potential hobby point credit of £37.50. The very same model is now on sale at £169 - a discount of just over £70. I appreciate that Hornby is in the business of making profits, but still and all, given the very recent launch of this model, I do feel that selling this model so soon with effectively double the collector's club discount is a bit of a kick in the teeth. I imagine a number of retailers will also feel aggrieved that they too have been undercut on pricing. Consequently, once I have the received the points when the East Anglian arrives and have spent them on another loco, I will let the club membership lapse. Going forward I will be placing my business with a retailer and giving buying directly from Hornby a miss.

My P2/2 Thane of Fife just arrived, and I was pleased to see that it came in the new style sturdy box and far better outer packaging as a courier protection method. This is in contast to a W1 I received just a few weeks ago where the cardboard box encased model was just rattling around in an oversized outer box. Fingers crossed that the new style packaging will be a feature of all newly launched models going forward.