ColinB

I must admit the only disadvantage I have noticed of the fixed pony truck is it messed up my idea for operating a relay to set frog polarity with the blade of the point. The issue of derailing with the front bogie is either there isn't enough weight on it or the back to back wheel alignment is wrong. I did also notice that sometimes it is due to there not being enough travel (up and down movement) on the bogie itself. On the latest Coronation Duchess I ordered on the club I found it derailed easily. I compared with my other Duchess locos and found they have used a shorter shouldered screw to hold the front bogie to its bracket, meaning on my layout it derailed all the time on one section of track. Replaced the screw with a longer one and the problem solved.

The other thing to be wary of with replacement bodies is there are 4 types. You can ignore the very early tender driven ones with slots in the front where the cylinder block clips in. The other three differ in the rear. Hornby changed the chassis for their Railroad Mallards on the later and current model and the slot at the rear where it attaches is further back. I assume this one is the later Railroad type. The Super Detail A4s have the earlier type chassis and the earlier China produced tender driven ones have an even different rear slot.

I am with the rest unless it is incredibly cheap or you have a spare body then pass on this one and wait for another. If your were to buy it weathering can hide a multitude of sins but then that costs extra money. How does someone get that much glue on it anyway? I can understand a fingerprint where you use the glue and then touch the body forgetting the odd traces of glue on you finger tips. I suppose they squeezed on the tube and it came out all at once, superglue is terrible for it.

Of course Bee you have never noticed any price increase you pre order as I do because currently it fixes the price. As a company though it is not good practice to keep increasing prices without good reason, there becomes a point where you price yourself out of the market. I suspect there are a lot of companies that have jumped on the bandwagon by increasing prices above their increase in costs. Unless the product is absolutely necessary you find the public either doesn't buy it or switches to a cheaper brand. Big problem for Hornby is they are selling to a limited market who probably have previous versions of a particular loco. If they come out with a highly priced replacement for say a Flying Scotsman, even though it may have better detail a lot of people will stick with their old one or buy the previous version second hand. These Coronation Coaches are the exception they didn't exist before, so I suppose Hornby thinks captive audience, milk it for what it is worth. It didn't work so well with the APT, I got mine with £200 off.

You can actually buy the 21 pin DCC circuit board Peters Spares has two. The connections to the tender are exactly the same as the new 8 pin PCB. £18.00 seems a bit expensive but you can sometimes pick them up second hand. It is a pity Hornby don't sell as parts for a reasonable price but there again that is Hornby.

We know they designed this product ages ago it was on their Yesterday program, so they pretty well knew the cost ages ago.

I hear what you are saying but it appears most other products do a market survey send it to a department that does all the cost estimation before they do the detailed design. Model railways seem to be unique in this concept. In Hornby's case if it costs too much to produce they just delay it and delay it. You can justify their methods until the cows come home, the end result is if you don't produce a product quickly enough you eventually go bust as you have nothing to sell and the public get fed up waiting.

I pre ordered a 9F that supposedly comes with sound, but when it arrives who knows.

Actually AndyMac I do look at it as a business, surprisingly I know a reasonable amount about it having worked for a small firm for a little while. As I said in my previous response we have been through this before. I just take the view Hornby can increase their prices as much as they want, that does not mean I am going to buy their product. I tend to look at the other manufacturers products for value and how much they charge, which gives a reasonable idea if a product is overpriced, so by comparison Hornby are generally about 10% more expensive than the rest. Bachmann charges amazing amounts for their coaches especially the DCC fitted ones but I also notice that these are the first things discounted in sales. Either whatever my views are it makes no difference to how Hornby runs so I will leave it at that. Funny I was looking at my pre orders with Hornby the other day, the list was quite large, it really did make me wonder if I would ever see any of them.

I know, we have discussed it many times. I really do wonder how long it is before Hornby stop honoring pre order prices but then I suppose they would be shooting off their own foot. I too pre ordered them, I didn't realise that they were were now due for release in 2024 that has got to be at least two years late. As to the price rise, well with the retirement of SK I just get the opinion Hornby are in turmoil.

I assume it is for making PCBs you send them your PCB info and they send back the PCBs. We used a similar firm at work when we were making some test equipment for development and we were doing it on the cheap.

Interesting comment Rallymatt. I doubt that that they bring production back to the UK but more for lack of finance. Having watched an excellent YouTube video by Jenny Kirk it appears most of production is by machine. The model making skills are in the dies necessary for production, which Margate probably still designs. As for the skills shortage, it is called training which a lot of manufacturers seen to not want to do. China is no longer as cheap as it originally was, plus the political situation would be worrying for any producer in this country. We then have the quality aspect, China are happy with 10% failure rate most of the UK manufacturers expect a fraction of a percent. On a loco costing over £200 that equates to many unhappy customers. It fascinates me how companies can borrow to buy other companies when they are heavily into debt, but I assume that they are hoping that this investment might improve their fortunes.

Yes it does, I fitted it to my chassis and it fits perfectly.

I must admit I am not up on the Hornby development of the Deltics. Looking at the specification it looks like a new design with central motor and both bogies driven. Now I know it is a die cast body but it is still significantly more expensive than what I paid for my Accurascale one.

Bulleidboy you may be right but I do know I have had endless issues with those drawbar connections. I bought a Railroad A4 that had been detailed to look like a wartime black Seagull, really good conversion. It worked perfectly without the tender, add the tender and it shorted intermittently. I traced the fault to the drawbar, which is probably why I got it reasonably cheap secondhand. What I suspect happens is the connectors that stick up to connect to the flat copper PCB on the tender occasionally touch the pin.

I have had issues in the past with the drawbar connector shorting out, that is one of the other reasons for using the later 4 pin connection arrangement. What I do in this situation is firstly wire up the loco for DCC, which you have done. Now check it runs Ok without the tender attached. Do all the checks for DCC, now try it on DCC. If it works then that proves your DCC is wired correctly. Now you need to examine the drawbar connector to check to see if it is shorting out anywhere, I have had so many issues with these connections. The trouble is with these old locos is the tender pickups over the years have oxidised and don't work that well, so you may well connect the tender and it works ok then suddenly the tender pickups work and cause the short. Another thing I do is put the loco on a stretch of track and lift the tender slightly so it doesn't connect to the track and see if the short disappears. Hope that helps. You are highlighting all the reasons why I rewire the pickups and add the 4 pin connector to the loco tender setup.

I have converted many of these. I must admit I generally wire them so the socket is in the tender, so I add the latest Hornby 4 pin connector setup and modify the tender to suit. The important bit is that on early Hornby locos the pickups on one side of the loco go to the chassis. I think it might be the red wire. So if you take the loco bottom off you will see a long casting in the shape of a pin on the chassis which when you screw the pickup plate on it connects the pickups on one side to the chassis. Now when I convert mine I usually file this down to about 2 mm long so it engages with the plastic pickup plate but not the pickups. I then attach a separate wire to the pickup. Mind you if you don't do this there still shouldn't be an issue. Check the bottom motor connection it is awfully close to the chassis so it might be inadvertently touching it. Generally when I convert a loco, I check that there is no continuity with the motor connections (orange and grey) and the pickup wires (red and black). In DC it doesn't matter but in DCC it will blow up your decoder.

If you don't want to get them from China via EBay, I think Road and Rails does them with leads attached.

To be honest these JST connectors are too small to deal with. I do as someone else mentioned earlier just cut the speaker supplied away from the lead and solder the new speaker to the old lead. Those JST connector quite often fall apart when put together properly by the manufacturer so unless you are very good at assembling them, assembling them yourself is best avoided.

To my view Hornby shouldn't even be putting it into a catalogue unless the release date is within the next year. As I have said on many occasions Model Railways and especially Hornby have some weird ways of doing business. I don't order my car and wait 3 years for them to start producing it, even 6 months is too long for a lot of people. I think Covid made things worse, fortunately for Hornby the other manufacturers are only slightly better. Trouble is, as the British Motorcycle industry found out, someone eventually comes along with a different approach and wipes you out.

I have to admit that there are so many different types of Model Shops that using a global umbrella for all of them is a bit unfair. Today I went round Monk Bar in York and TMS near Whitby, the way they run their businesses are totally different. One is totally computer driven the other is a Model Shop. Personally I like the shop approach as I see what I am getting there and then, which sets it apart from the computer approach as I might as well just order it on the web. There are many locos that I have bought because I liked the look of them in the shop. Conversely there are an awful lot that I have ordered over the Web and been disappointed. You mention the HVC but similarly a lot of Heritage lines stock Model Railway products which I assume is probably close to the "experience". I don't know if they actually sell many Hornby products that they display. Trouble is most of Hornby products are targeted at enthusiasts that is why they can justify the price, so I don't think that they will change that very easily. Perhaps they should bin the locos and concentrate on "Play Trains" which possibly could have a big market. Never know, perhaps that is why someone retired.

Well Moccasin you are probably right, but this word "experience" seems a bit over used lately. The first issue they will have is the availability of promised products, how can you push a product when you don't know when it is arriving. Most retailers are having issues even Amazon.

Perhaps I am wrong but Hornby seemed to have a good arrangement with Rails until they messed it up with the tier system. Rails were very proactive in the Model Railway market constantly reminding people what Hornby models were coming out, a similar service as they do with Bachmann. I used to buy a lot of my Hornby locos from Rails as I virtually do with my Bachmanns. I assume Hornby stamped on that agreement because they thought they could make more money in other ways. So it appears they can't, so who would want to work with them now? It reminds me of a subsidiary of my old firm, when it was part of the larger organisation its managers strived to become independent, for people like me it was obvious that it would be bust in two years ( I used to look at how our competitors worked I had also worked for other firms). Low and behold they spun off the firm and it was bust within 4 years (ok, it took longer) and those managers that pushed for independence lost their high value pensions. As for Rails they seem to be doing just fine without Hornby.

There was a thread on the extra 2 pin connector on the Hornby Dublo A4 Sir Nigel Gresley. As far as I know nobody ever responded to what it was for. As to speakers I use Road and Rails ones, they sell a very thin one that fits well and sounds really good. An HD loco is no different to a normal A4 made by Hornby, except the Railroad varieties (different tender and DCC fitting). The new HD Sir Nigel Gresley has a different drawbar with integrated pcb so I assume the tender bottom is different, I haven't taken mine apart yet to check. Because these tenders are long there is plenty of room for the decoder plus bass speaker, just avoid the front where the coal bunker slopes and the extreme back where the tender top dips.

Interesting post I have only just read it. To anyone that is not a Hornby disciple it is not a great surprise. They had that great year during Covid but generally model railways is not that popular. Hornby have also invested in new products, one the HM7000 has not been a roaring success basically because of it being late to the market. Their tier system alienated a lot of the Retailers and you only have to look at the Retailer Sales to realise things are not moving as well as they should be. So introducing a new set of Retailers I don't think is going to improve things. Then we have the hap hazard way new models reach the market, nobody knows when they are going to arrive. Ok for the die hard Hornby lovers, they will wait, for others they will find something else to spend their money on. They are just my thoughts.