What About The Bee

Hello HST Mainline Your concern was mine as well. Do I gamble, and wait for the 1825 version, or take the sure thing? Did I understand the heavy hint properly, or was that simply wishful thinking on my part, reading too much into what was actually said? In the end, after hours of deliberation and fence sitting, I decided that I the video of the model running on track was impossible to resist. I have ordered the current version. I always treat my models with care, so if the 1825 version does come along, I will order it and sell the Era 11 version of Locomotion No.1 on. A safe, if possibly more expensive route. Your milage may vary of course, but I had no intention of missing out on such an iconic model. Bee

After sitting on the fence all day, I finally surrendered. Locomotion No.1 is on order. Hornby also listened to the request of many. Hornby now have single offerings for carriages like Royal Mail (R40436) and the Booth Carriage (R40438). Walker shows us multiples of the Booth carriage, in a consist in the Olive Mount Cutting, and so I have ordered a few of those as well. Bee

Hello Bexhill Donkey I do believe that the "Railroad Range" offered by Hornby is overtly stated to be the entry point to starting modelers. So much so that during the 2024 Range Announcement, Mike explicitly stated that. Now most in the audience were likely not beginners. But the audience may have children and/or grandchildren and the idea of a gift is planted. Bee

Locomotion No.1 today is as R346¹ Rocket was to Hornby in 1963. An impossible delight that captures the imagination. Yet I am so completely struggling with it. First the cons. 1) Just like many other locomotives which capture my eye, this isn't the LMR. Whilst many here do have a more ad hoc approach, I am single minded about my railway of choice. Locomotion No.1 is Stockton and Darlington Railway, not LMR. 2) When ever a bit of novel technology is first made available, there will be novel failures. This valve gear, as Gilbo points out, is certainly in that category. It is never a great idea to be in the first experimental user group. 3) Locomotion No.1 is portrayed as Era 11, preserved. There are anachronistic features that would not have been present in 1825. Pros A) The LMR was chartered as a public thoroughfare. Colliery owned chaldrons and locomotives traveled over the rails. The collieries paid a fee for transit over the rails, but maintained their own equipment. The LMR never did own chaldrons. 2) While mechanical drawings of LMR owned coal wagons do exist, they were not as R60164. I already have the Accurascale chaldrons. Locomotion No.1 was a colliery locomotive. The combination of chaldrons and Locomotion No.1 is the fundamental S&DR portrayal, a colliery train. 3) If I am to have a colliery train, therefore, Locomotion No.1 is a natural fit, albeit incorrect. Wrong railway, wrong era. Better to wait for S&DR Era 1 release? Shake out the novel failures, get the 1825 version of Locomotion No.1. Maybe Hornby will also release the S&DR carriage 'Experiment'. Bee ¹ Did Hornby deliberately select R30346 as a nod to the past?

Looking quite good Shaka! Hornby have stated that Locomotion No.1 will have a NEM pocket, so that it may have either the Accurascale coupling direct to chaldrons or the Hornby finescale chain post. My solution to the chaldron coupling issue was to make a small loop of wire to fit over the finescale chain post which supported a magnet at the appropriate distance. That is, an adapter from Hornby finescale chain post to Accurascale magnetic coupling. Works a treat, without modifying any delivered component. But yours, I can see, works equally as well. Well done! Bee

You have that exactly right DRC. Hornby said as much, in both the Range Release video and the Q&A video. There were heavy hints that Locomotion No.1 would be re-released as Era 1 for the 200 year anniversary of the S&DR, in Era 1 configuration. Not precise words, but heavy hints. The current version being Era 11, current day, preserved. Bee

After Range Announcement, Hornby have scheduled a Q&A with Hornby Head of Brand and Hornby Head of Development. You will find that here Comments are up to 200 characters long in this format. Get your questions ready! Bee

12 hours until Range Announcement 2024

Hello Vicky How does the motor sound when out of the chassis? To put it differently, how can you be sure it is the motor itself? Bee

For the benefit of those who wish to see Eric's review of the Big Boy Superset: Just skip beyond Eric singing at the very beginning. A wonderful singing voice it is not. Atom - Every scale involves some sort of compromise to make it work. Even 7¼" Live Steam has compromises. I am continually confronted by the OO Squish for our narrow track in my CAD designs. So I am not bothered by the size of the flanges for Lionel O scale models. Unless one is to make life sized "models" to run on miles and miles of actual rail, there will always be a compromise. At the locomotive manufacturing facility I worked at, there was an internal spur rail network, since the locomotives had to be moved about. Before delivery, the locomotives were test run on a 4 mile length of track. Straight out, along the mainline, straight back. Call it an end to end layout, with an interconnection to the mainline for delivery. That is as close as anyone could come to layout without compromise. Bee

Addendum to the LMR Sheep Wagons P.H. Reynolds made some consist style sketches of the LMR in 1834. Of course, this makes them long beyond copyright protection. I was looking over the 2nd class consist he sketched and noticed that there is a sheep wagon in the rear. Further, Reynolds shows it being unloaded, making it possibly the only depiction of the sheep wagon with a ramp attached. There are two basic types of ramps. One is the board style, the other an earthen ramp. This is clearly the board style. The image may be zoomed. Pulling the consist is "Liver", LMR26. We can be sure it is Liver, because it is the only Bury type locomotive on the LMR. Bury locomotives have that dome shaped firebox. Reynolds denotes the image is of 1833 in his title, Liver delivered to the LMR in 1832. Next is a transitional tender, with the square metal box for water, replacing the wooden barrel. Note the height of the coal load, far beyond the load sizes provided for Era 1 models. The carriage behind the tender is unknown to me. It is not the standard 2nd class, compare it to the carriage immediately behind. Next is the standard 2nd class. The "blue" carriages modeled by Hornby, but here in brown, not blue. Next, there are four 2nd class carriages with the round bottom doors. The seat backs could be shifted from front to back, permitting multiple rows of passengers to all face the same way, just as depicted! Behind that, there is the slat side wagon, slightly obscured by the red circle. I have been drafting this model in CAD. Interestingly, it appears as if cargo is being loaded into the slat side wagon with a small overhead crane. Behind that is the sheep wagon, previously noted, and last is a horse wagon. Of further note is the mixing of 2nd class carriages with freight and livestock. All of the other consist depictions, by Ackermann, Crane, Austen, Freeling and Walker split the consist depictions into one of four classes: 1st Class Trains (passenger) , 2nd Class Trains (passenger), mixed freight trains and livestock trains. I thought to update the review with this note, keeping the information under the same heading. Bee

Hi Atom Eric recently reviewed a "Big Boy Superset" in O gauge Vision Line. The list price of that set was $4499.99 or £3542. Just a wee bit more than Hornby Dublo. Hi 81F You wrote "Working Dynamometer" car with connection to a PC. Call me +1 on that. 1) Working load cell on the front of the car, so as to be able to measure applied tractive effort. 2) Working load cell of the rear of the car, so as to be able to measure the frictional drag of the consist. 3) Velocity via an encoded axle. 4) Accelerometer, single axis arranged longitudinally. Measure applied acceleration. Stephenson's Dynamometer intrigues me! 5) Bluetooth connectivity. Yes, I am +1 Bee

There is a problem with expecting your flanges to support the load in the frog, and it is inescapable. It assumes that 100% of all your wheel flanges have identical height above the drum. Why? Because as each wheel traverses the flangeway of the frog, the flange must just roll onto the flangeway, neither dropping down or riding up. Now let me ask you what happens as the frog wears? Eventually, the wear stops, as the drum of the wheel rides only on the rail, preventing the flange from touching the bottom of the flangeway of the frog. Why not skip to that step directly, the depth of the flangeway of the frog should be deeper than the height of your tallest flange relative to the drum. But Bee, won't the wheel drop into the flange gap? On the prototype, the width of the drum is sufficient to span the lateral gap. That is, the wheel rides on multiple rail head at the frog. The check rails are in place to assure that the drum of the wheel is positioned laterally over the frog. It isn't fool proof, but is much more readily accomplished than insuring all your flange heights, on every piece of rolling stock, is precisely matched to the depth of the flangeway. Impossible. Bee

Norfolk Southern is one of the major rail companies in the US, to this very day. It is nice to see you represent it Alberto. I would like to draw your attention to an NS modeler who has a very nice layout indeed. But please remember, if this is a competition, the modeler who is having the most fun wins! I will begin with the coal flood loader operations. Coal is loaded into hopper cars for transit to other operations. Note that an actual live load is placed into the hoppers. After transiting to the other end of the layout, a long steep incline, the hopper cars are unloaded with a functional rotary dumper, here Live product is unloaded. Note that this end of the layout is above the other, so coal dumped here runs down a shoot to the flood loader, to begin the cycle again. Here is his video of a continuous welded rail maintenance of way train. Prepare yourself to wonder how it was done. There are so many amazing details on this layout, it is astonishing to see. Poke around his playlist for other features. While you do, here is his layout tour from 2020 Bee

Hi Andrew Welcome Aboard. The controller is going into thermal overload when you run two locomotives. You are drawing a pinch too much power and the controller doesn't like it. The controller that comes with the starter sets is suitable for one locomotive, but not two. So the circuit will shut itself off to prevent damage in the overload situation. If you wish to run two locomotives, you will need a controller that can service more amps (more grunt). The arcing and controller shut down may be a short circuit. That's a bit more concerning, but not by much. If the controller experiences a short circuit, it results in large current draw. Similar to above, the controller prevents self damage. You need not unplug and plug back in, the controller will reset on its own after a time. That's better practice anyway. If you have a moment, sketch your track and how you have it wired. There are some very knowledgeable folks who can and will help you around here. Bee

I have just now received a Hornby Email. 9 AM GMT 9 January 2024 Confirmed. With a live chat with Hornby Head of Brand streamed on YouTube to follow. Bee

Hello Lee Shapeways is a 3D printing company. They accept your design, check it to make sure it can be printed and then print it in the materials of your choice. All for a price. You will find them on the web. The benefit of Shapeways is that you only need concern yourself with the design, not the printer. No chemicals, no process, no failures due to the design being unsuitable for 3D printing. The drawback is that for printing lots of stuff, it is not economical. It is fine for the occasional print. The genuine advantage you have right now is the broken part. It can be measured with a caliper and drawn into CAD directly. It is much harder starting with a blank screen with all the design and dimensions to be invented. This might be the time to learn CAD yourself, FreeCAD is available and, ahem, free! Just look on the web for FreeCAD. In so far as the search results for the part, you may find them yourself by searching various combinations of "466" "networker" "x8209" with "Hornby". What I found was fairly thin. Just requests for the part without resolution. That really isn't much help. Olivia's Trains does seem to have two complete models, not just the part. Long winded? Mate, you should see my post on Brunton's Horse to go by Steam, December's edition of Railway Oddities. Ha! I think Archimedes was listening when I started off on my quest to explain it! Bee

Wapples If I may be so bold. I understood the message to say: purchase the Minitrains models. Run them on N gauge track, which is narrow gauge in OO scale. Your other nominal OO models will run on the OO track, not the N gauge track. There will be, of necessity, an interchange where your passengers walk across a platform, from the 16.5mm OO track to the 9mm narrow gauge track, where they board the narrow gauge train to the picnic area. Your mileage may vary. I think it will be easier to add a special narrow gauge line to your layout than to recreate the narrow gauge cars and locomotives in standard OO gauge. Bee

Hello and Welcome Aboard Lee Service Sheet 202, dated 1997, and Service Sheet 202C, dated 2003, show part X8209. So 27 and 21 years old, respectively. As recently as May 2023, a request identical to yours was presented to RMWeb. They wanted to know if someone had a 3d print for X8209. Zero response. You requested advice. Here is mine. You have the parts in front if you, albeit broken ones. Draw the part in CAD. Print it at Shapeways. It does not appear overwhelming, the image I saw on RMWeb of one looked fairly straight forward. The devil is in the details, of course. Perhaps there is some feature not obvious or I have underestimated. I cannot know if you can navigate a CAD program or not, so this may not be appropriate advice either. It is, however, what I would try to do. Draw the part myself. Have it printed. Bee

BOLSTERS There is another approach to bolsters which I had initially discarded. Holes in the floor, which are sized to barely fit the posts. The posts are held upright. The first benefit is obvious. The appearance is much more like the Ackermann prints. The posts appear to come right out of the floor. The second benefit is more subtle: part reduction. It is always a good thing to reduce parts in an assembly, as this reduces cost and reduces build up of tolerance problems. From 35 parts to 5! The drawback is insidious. The bases of the posts now protrude into the chassis, creating potential conflict with standard Hornby Era 1 chassis components. The wheels are critical, do not interfere with the motion. To check, I added in the Hornby wheels and axles. I then thought of a way to add in the cattle artwork, scaling the cattle to the cattle wagon. It isn't perfect, just representative. THE CONUNDRUM, EXPLAINED At last I can see where the conundrum of the "small cattle problem" arises. When the slat sides of the Ackermann cattle wagon is made identical to the slat sides of my OO cattle wagon, I observe two things. Firstly, the cattle are sized to the slat sides appropriately. Hurrah! The Rule of Three prevails. Secondly, the Hornby wheels are entirely too large, raising the height of the chassis. If I am to keep to the overall height of the wagon, then both the cattle and slat sides must shrink! This is the nub of the conundrum, finally!! Now to be careful, I do not blame Hornby for attention to the 1930s LMS reproductions of 1st class LMR carriages. I do not blame Hornby for re-using the 1st class chassis for all other wagons. Both make perfect business sense. Well done, actually. This just forces me to use smaller cattle to fit the imagery, an acceptable OO compromise. The conundrum of small cattle is resolved Bee

Hello Aussie Fred I assume you have seen this? https://www.gordonstrams.net/MCTpage1a.htm No idea if this works or not. Bee

This month's edition nearly slipped my mind. Whoops! Dynamometer Cars have been used for quite some time on the railways, famously behind some record setting speed runs. Wonderful OO models have been made. Yet one of the first Dynamometer Cars was created by George Stephenson and Nicholas Wood to study retarding friction. Assume a flat level track. In a frictionless environment, a small shove would set a car rolling and it would roll forever, until an opposing shove was made. But in the real world, the energy of a small shove is consumed by friction and the car comes to a stop. Stephenson and Wood needed to reduce the retarding friction, so as to be able to haul more with the same power. This device is extremely clever. In practice, it measures the acceleration provided to the device. If we give the dynamometer car a small shove, and watched it stop, the pendulum member would continue forward because it is not decelerated at the same rate as the car. In practice, Stephenson and Wood kept the car moving at a steady pace by having a work crew push it along from behind the pendulum, the chaldron to the front. The amount of acceleration applied by the crew was measured by the pendulum on the semicircular scale. The chaldron in front was loaded with different weights, the axle bearings made wide and narrow, lubricated with this, lubricated with that, the wheels evaluated, different materials & etc and the acceleration measured. Rails themselves could be compared as well. While not an absolute measurement, it was relative to the other measurements. Altering the circumstances permitted them to see which configuration provided the least retarding friction, by measuring the acceleration input. The significance of this cannot be overestimated. The ability to haul larger loads for the same unit if power facilitated the entire industry. All done in 1818. This is an oddity because there was only ever one of these. Stephenson's Dynamometer. Bee

That is my recollection as well, Gilbo. 100%, spot on. Bee

9 January 2024. I have seen 0900 GMT expected time. Bee

Ptolemy Before you run off and ballast your track, may I suggest you have a play with the new layout? Find out what parts of the layout you like. Determine what parts you do not. Change the track to be more to your liking. Of course, if you haven't laid the track, do that first. If you have the track laid, but it isn't wired, do that as well, even if only temporarily (wires exposed). Ballasting your track will change the way the layout looks, but does not change the way the layout works. The layout should work to your preferences before you ballast. Bee