ColinB

Go round the wood yard in the UK. The wood comes in 3 metre lengths but it is sold by the foot.

I pretty sure it is 21 days since my last preorder came, so perhaps I had better shoot off a mail to Hornby to see what is going on. Mind you, I have all those points and most that I want is already on preorder from two years ago, so really not much use.

I am not getting into this that is just an observation. Bachmann recently had to sell many of its class 37 locos at a discount because most people were buying the Accurascale one, in fact unless you preordered one it was really difficult to buy one. Most people when comparing products do what I do compare the price with what you actually get for your money, so quite often just because something is cheap it doesn't necessarily mean it is worth buying, similarly just because something is highly priced doesn't always mean it is wonderful. I have worked for large companies and small companies, the overheads issue is irrelevant, that is part of your unit cost, if your unit cost is too high you don't sell anything. As for Hornby not being profitable that could be due to lots of reasons, things that are not relevant here. To give you an instance of overheads. On most of our audio software we used to employ 3 people per program to write software, split between the number of radios we sold, the cost of that resource was lost. We had a new manager take over who decided they wanted 21 software engineers (to write more processes not the final product), this actually added a dollar to the cost of the radio. That dollar was the difference between profit and loss.

The HM7000 is usually pretty reliable so I really do doubt it is that. The firebox flicker is working so the loco is picking up power. Does the sound work? If it does then the tender is picking up power, if it doesn't then it is the HM7000. If the sound is working it then comes down to one thing, the dreaded drawbar connector. Now what you can do if it is that, is disconnect loco and tender and reconnect them, that might be enough to scape off any oxide on the connector. If not you might have to lightly clean the contacts on the drawbar connector. Normally it would be a return to Hornby but you are in Australia, so very carefully use a track rubber or ink rubber to clean the connector. You need to remove any oxide which is why you use a rubber, just iso probably won't do it properly. Once it is clean then finish up with the iso to remove the residue. If none of this works, sadly it is a return to Hornby.

Hornby pricing on things like that is a bit weird I bought a 9F with HM7000 fitted. The price was only about £30 more that buying the loco without and that was at full price. I don't know if it was an attempt to compete with Accurascale where if you buy the loco with sound fitted, you get the sound for effectively £80, which £40 cheaper than if you bought the decoder separate. They say that it will be a variable price rise so it will be interesting to see what the spread is. Coming back to the original subject I don't know if it is physiological but Accurascale increase their price slightly with each model but I get the opinion most people myself included, accept that they are trying their best to keep prices down and quality up. This has the effect that less people complain about them and will put up with a lot (in the 1980s it was the Skoda buyers syndrome).

I know I did the same. That is ok for the preorders in the pipeline, but I must admit I would seriously have to have a long think to pay £325 for that loco. Then there comes the next issue people will expect a lot more for that price, so they need to avoid the hiccups they have had with this model.

To be fair some of their practices are a bit weird, like giving away a 2024 catalogue if you spend a certain amount. I mean most people here will already have one, so not a great incentive. Then there are the points, seems they have difficulty updating them. I have something like 8000 plus pending, have done for a while, I am not sure that there are for things preordered or stuff that has been delivered in the last month. Either way I don't think I have spent enough to warrant that many points. The club membership with 10% off was a much better idea. Same price as at the Retailers and you collect all those membership fees.

The Commonwealth of Australia is not a die cast body and HM7000 is not a Zimo sound decoder. I got my HD Dwight D Eisenhower for £260, a significant reduction from its RRP but adding Zimo sound which the Dapol has is £124 so about £384 without smoke, so as I say £400 is good value. Go onto Rails look at the specification, an HD with all that would be at least £500. The HM7000 is nowhere near a Zimo sound decoder, believe me, I have HD A4s fitted with both.

I really do doubt that a snubber is going to fix your DC runaway. Generally when my locos do it, it is because of dirty track. The software in the decoder gets confused with the intermittent signal. It also depends a lot on the software inside the decoder and how it copes with a disappearing DCC signal. A did a load of tests with different decoders, some were terrible some were brilliant. So coming back to the subject it could be that horrible connector or it could be that some of the pickups are not working properly. What I do is lift the tender off the track and see if the loco works and then put the tender back on the track and lift the loco. You would be amazed how often I find one of pickup sets is not working. Of course then there is the track.

According to the "Die Hards" on RMWeb seems they are happy to pay the price, would be interesting to see how many Hornby locos they buy in a year. They seem to think it is just "knocking" Hornby thread. The thing people have to realise, even before this price rise their locos were just not competitive, disagree with me if you want, just do a comparison on a class 56 or 60. At the moment there are certain locos and products that only they make but as the price rises it allows competitors to come in below them. Someone was saying the Humbrol paint prices are supposedly through the roof although £4.00 a pot to me doesn't seem a lot, but it seems less Retailers are stocking them because of the price. I have just ordered a Rails Dapol A4, it is £400 but then when I worked it out, if I bought a HD A4 loco and then added Zimo sound it would be more than £450. The Dapol has more features than a HD A4, so its price is very competitive. Fortunately all my Hornby products are preordered so no big deal to me and I have no intention of buying anymore at full price.

I did check, Locomotion with TMC was the only one. From the mail it looks like TMC are going to fix the price at the price now if you preorder by August the 31st. I have a few locos I preordered a couple of years ago from Hornby direct, but they are probably my last. I preordered the Deltic DP1 but I gather Accurascale are talking about producing different variants, not in die cast, but I can get a sound fitted one for virtually the same price.

Just got a mail from TMC telling me that Hornby are increasing their prices by 10 to 12% from the 1st September. Whoever posted the original rumour got the percentage wrong (20%) but it appears not the rest. I suppose I best go around the sites and see if there are any locos I preordered from Retailers rather than directly from Hornby. Fortunately I think most of them were ordered off Hornby when I got 10% for belonging to their club.

I bought a DCC Concepts unit and was very surprised how good it is.

Yes they all do it, have done for a long time. If you buy anything from Amazon US the same applies, that is why I could not understand all the concern with paying it for items from the EU. This is a Model Railway forum so least said about that the better. I don't know what it is with goods from China, postage is sometimes less than first class and they seem to do a lot of things you can't get anywhere else.

I am just using the standard header that you would find on say a Zimo or Hornby decoder although the Hornby ones did have a slot for cable retention. For my Bachmann class 08s I replaced the 8 pin socket for a Hornby Pecket 6 pin, that plus a direct 6 pin decoder gave me more room. You can buy Plux18 sockets which are even smaller although soldering to them is a bit of a challenge.

Yes, thank for the information. I have some of those, they are ok but they melt when you solder to them and they are a bit high. The wires tend to fall off easier than if they were soldered to a PCB. Zimo used to do the ones I like, but they are out of stock. I have 3 coming sometime in the future, I assume from China. It is just annoying nobody in the UK stocks them. Coastal DCC did have some that were a bit better, but the ones I ordered were exactly what I wanted.

Thank you for the info but the one I am looking for is the type normally fitted to a decoder, someone has hard wired my one, so I need to rewire it to a plain header ( basically just pins). The one your link shows is a DC header where pins 1 is connected to 8 and 4 is connected to 5. You can get 8 pin sockets that you can wire to, but these are not that good for long term reliability and the height is a bit of a restriction as well.

This one was hard wired and the speaker was glued to the upper body, I think the original speaker was broken. I had to buy a 8 pin header off Ali Express as could not find one anywhere. I will put the decoder in the tender as I do with all my other locos.

Hornby West Country class renamed to Plymouth, had running issues. Imagine my surprise when I opened it up to find a Zimo/LokSound (don't know which yet) inside. Unfortunately it was hard wired but I can sort that. Poor running is probably due to the old pickup system so I will update it to the newer system by fitting the latest loco bottom. The sound decoder works as well, so a double bonus.

I suppose the motor could drawing too much current at start up, we do know from other posts this can be an issue. Then there is the speaker, it might be a 4 ohm, that would cause issues.

Possibly, normally what you do with pushbuttons is take the unit apart and either clean the pad with a solvent or ink/track rubber. The pad seems to attract all sorts of gunge. On my one the big red push button had lost its end, I temporarily fixed it with a cocktail stick until Hornby supplied me with a new one free of charge. I get the opinion that wouldn't happen now.

Nop can't be LaisDCC as I use that one and it works ok. Sound is a bit "tinny" but then when you look at the loudspeaker you can see why. I can't see why the motor won't work or the speaker, it is pretty standard stuff. The other thing you could is plug in another 21 pin sound decoder if you have one and see if it woirks. Come to that any old 21 pin decoder will be good enough to test the motor function.

Yes, but they don't know until they look at it. That screen looks proprietary so I would be surprised it they have changed it in all the years they have been making them. It would cost too much and on the number of units they make probably not worth it. I keep trying to remember what the hardware was on the displays we used, but it is a long time ago. They say they can't fix it so end of story.

It seems to new management are enforcing all the rules. Sure if you can't get the parts to fix it it I can understand it, but normally you would replace the pcb inside with newer parts and charge the Customer accordingly. When I took mine apart to fix the keyboard (I bought mine broken) the technology was pretty old school and if the numbering is to be believed, mine is a 2015 model.

As I said previously in my experience there are about 3 types. You have the basic type which Deem shows in his photo, you have the thin ones for holding on valve gear/speedo drives and oil pumps on A4s, then finally I found on a Railroad Tornedo they were totally different. Generally most are the first two options. I forgot the original Bullied locos are different they have shouldered ones. A quick scan of New Modellers shows the X7659 as a good bet, it is from a Hush Hush and is £5.40, you get six screws four of the thick ones and two of the type for the valve gear. If Lendons have them they will be cheaper. Obviously you will get all the valve gear which you don't want but £5.40 is good value for the screws. They are special order at Lendons for £4.49. Other than getting Hornby to send you a feebie (hope you have better luck than I did) I doubt even if they did then as a separate item you could get them cheaper.