Tech Spec Errors

[What About The Bee]

Era 1 Rolling stock

R40102 R1

R40357 R2 <<<<<

R40436 R1

R40437 R1

R40438 R1

R40439 R1

R40445 R2 <<<<<

R60014 R1

R60164 R3 <<<<<

R60165 R3 <<<<<

R60166 R3 <<<<<

R60275 R1

R60276 R1

Since the vast majority of the Era 1 rolling stock is based on the same chassis, there should be one specification for minimum radius. It should not be R3, in any event. The coal cagon, and possibly Adelaide's Saloon, have a different chassis, but are equivalent in size and likely have the same minimum radius.

Further, items that come in both sets of three and a single carriage, the specification should agree betwixt them.

R40436 is specified to come with a NEM pocket. Yet R40357, with identical Adelaide's Saloon is specified with chains.

R40437 is specified to come with a NEM pocket. Yet the Royal Mail carriage also came in R3956, and has chains. 

R30346 Locomotion is specified to come with chains. Yet Carl, Hornby Head of Development, said during the Q&A video that it would "work with Accurascale" chaldrons. While I have made such an adaptor, it would seem that this locomotive should have a NEM pocket. But chains is specified on the webpage.

Hopefully, this makes it into the hands of the Hornby Webmaster for correction.

Bee

[Going Spare]

No, it won't, Bee. Send it to marketing@hornby.com. Both the website and catalogue are rife with errors, which are (very slowly) being sorted out.

[What About The Bee]

Thank you Going Spare. I have just sent that off to the address you specified.

I thought that perhaps this was the proper venue.

The day I hit the lottery, and buy the company known as Hornby, there may be just a few tiny changes in culture.

Bee

[LTSR_NSE]

@bee - when organisations face difficult financial decisions they quite often outsource ‘back of house’ roles. Unfortunately whilst the outsource providers claim that they can offer a better & cheaper service (than employing staff) - they cannot offer two things the previous employees provided, that are simply lost:

• detailed knowledge & experience of the organisation’s product & operation.

• dedication & loyalty to the organisation & a desire to build a decent reputation.

Instead (unsurprisingly) outsource providers’ first priority is naturally to themselves & clients are generally treated based upon how much they pay.

Hornby having outsourced both their website & logistics do rather appear to be at the mercy of whatever quality of service those providers are willing/able to supply! 🙁

(I’ve had the privilege to work alongside & receive assistance from, some truly excellent & dedicated outsource provider employees. I’ve also experienced the misfortune of receiving outsourced ‘assistance’ & ‘management’ from some chocolate teapots.)

[What About The Bee]

Hello LT&SR_NSE

For the record, I have heard back from a Hornby representative, who said: "Thank you for sending this over. I will forward this to our online team."

I will now patiently wait to see if they do something / anything with the information.

I think the GIGO principle is at work here. Garbage In Garbage Out. Data supplied by Hornby to the online team, remarkably, appears on line. Whilst incongruities may jump off the page to some, the requirement to accurately reflect the data Hornby provided will take precedence. It is not the job of the online team to ensure the data is technically correct, rather, it is their job to ensure the data on the website matches the data provided. GIGO.

When a locomotive, carriage or wagon is assigned, there should be a definition of the radius the stock is intended to go around. That definition may either come from Engineering or Marketing, but certainly, someone should specify that. As many models are shown in Range Release before Engineering designs them, this means Marketing specifies the radius for new models. For models which have historical precedence, like Era 1 rolling stock using the same chassis, the minimum radius is defined by prior Engineering efforts.

All of this leads me to the conclusion that internal Hornby communications could use a bit of improvement.

There is absolutely no reason that, after 4 years, the minimum radius for Era 1 is not fixed, known and defined.

Bee

[LTSR_NSE]

@bee - I wholeheartedly agree with you that it appears to be the result of limited contextual proofreading.

My point is that when you can afford an in-house individual or team responsible for publishing information via website/catalogue (who both understands the product & cares about the organisation’s reputation) - if/when they are provided with material that contains errors, the errors are spotted, corrections sought from relevant parties & only accurate information is published.

However when the web/catalogue publishing are outsourced, then as you said - information is published exactly as supplied.

The difficulty is that when outsourcing has taken place, financial constraints will be increasing pressure on all employees & limiting the time they can spend on each task - which will naturally lead to less opportunity for accuracy & perfectionism!

[What About The Bee]

Agreed LT&SR_NSE, staff that cares does a better job. We are on the same page.

I think the only disagreement may be where the error arises. It is unfair to blame the lad who carefully installs the number he or she has been provided. Sure, it they had more knowledge, they might question it. But even an in-house web team cannot be held responsible.

It would be a good idea for the responsible parties at Hornby, who specify the data, to be responsible for it. For heavens sake, do the sheep wagons really require R3? Who thought that? Someone specified that. And it was approved. By in house staff.

I think I fixed my post, I must really stop copying Hornby statements and pasting them here. Nothing but trouble

Bee

[LTSR_NSE]

i don’t think we are disagreeing. I certainly don’t blame anyone for simply copying & pasting or entering data. I guess I (uselessly) blame the financial situations that result in the people who do care, either being undervalued & lost, or being placed in impossible situations that cause inaccuracies to go unchecked.

R1/2/3 discrepancies are easily explained if a spreadsheet is used:

• if a cell containing accurate data is highlighted & dragged downwards or sideways (whilst Ctrl is held) the data is copied to subsequent cells.

• whereas if cell is simply highlighted & dragged, each subsequent cell increases sequentially.

Such an error is extremely easy to make, but more difficult to spot - unless you are specifically looking for such discrepancies (contextual proofreading.)

[Moccasin]

This has been a bit of a bugbear of mine. Some on the forum rightly told me to stop whinging here and notify Hornby. I did that via the normal channels and was ignored. Finally, I lost patience and went to the Marketing Director (correctly guessed his email address). He replied pretty quickly and said he’d passed it on. I finally got a slightly-grumpy reply from a less senior colleague saying the errors I’d pointed out would be fixed.

While some errors were just annoying, others just showed incorrect models (e.g. the TT120 Blue 08 with a ladder on the front radiator) which those wanting to knock Hornby on another forum used as claimed evidence of their poor models (never mind those owning the model telling them that the actual model was correct). I pointed out that a company whose whole market was based on accurate recreation of the real thing did themselves no favours when their shop window was showing poor attention to accuracy and detail.

(I was a bit embarrassed though when, rather than updating the image to be consistent with the rest of the website, they just used a completely different image of the model running on their layout.)

[Simon-372339]

There is a std format for product information on the website.

The 'product file' being passed to the 'online team' in many cases is inaccurate or just missing information or there are differences between the same product where there are multiple entries for a product.

This is quite simply a management failure at Hornbys end.

[Moccasin]

Indeed - this entry for a TT120 HST power car pack has at least one rather obvious error…

[What About The Bee]

Moccasin

I cannot understand why you were admonished for posting website feedback, in a section of the forum called "Forum and Website Feedback"

I can understand that Hornby does not need to be snowed under a mountain of nitpicking complaints. It is impossible to satisfy all of the public, all of the time.

Ignoring valid issues is unwise. There should be a method by which valid issues are raised and corrective action taken.

The example in the original post is certainly valid. Exactly what coupling will Locomotion No.1 have? It is the featured locomotive this year, the cover image of the catalog.

In comment section after comment section on youTube, the question comes up....What coupling?

Carl, Head of Development, said it will work with Accurascale Chaldrons. The web page specifies chains. It is an OBVIOUS CONFLICT.

Does no one want to fix this? Answer it? Update the webpage? Inform the public?

Folks are saying "chains? I'm out." Literally basing their purchase decision on the website description.

Hornby needs to make a decision and fix this. Golly, this isn't that hard.

Bee

[LTSR_NSE]

I don’t believe anyone has intended to ‘admonish’ @Mocassin, @Bee, or anybody who has posted inaccuracies in this forum section.

Moderators & regular posters have merely sought to inform the unwary that Hornby does not appear to actively monitor the forum. Having persuaded some willing victims volunteers to moderate for free, and outsourced the website’s design & maintenance - Hornby appear to have let the administration fall into the nearest black hole!

Anyone spotting an inaccuracy is advised to report it directly to marketing@hornby.com - simply because it is the only method that has been proven to achieve results!

[Moccasin]

Sadly pointing errors out doesn’t actually seem to work without perseverance. I sent emails to marketing and to a brand manager highlighting errors in the model images and they were ignored. This is why I ended up going to the marketing director and apparently annoying several people at Hornby as a result.

[Moccasin]

To be honest Hornby could save themselves (and admins on this forum) a lot of time by setting up a dedicated website errors email address and post it in this forum.

A simple auto reply setting expectations on addressing errors (thanks for your email, errors are dealt with in groups, some take longer to address than others but your comments are useful etc) would save on dealing with pedants like me.

That way they have a repository for errors stored in one place and they can (if they want) check for recurring issues.

[RB51]

Sounds very reasonable Peter, it has been passed to Hornby. R-

[What About The Bee]

I finally took the plunge and wrote directly to Hornby Head of Development. Out of respect for the gentleman's inbox, I will not publish his contact details even if asked. I apologized for going out of channel, but asked the question about the coupling Locomotion No.1 is to have.

Here is what he had to say:

××××××××××

Firstly, I apologise for the misleading information on our website. We have passed over the information to the website team but sometimes it can take a while for the information to update on the website.

The answer to your question, locomotion will be supplied with the following:

Moulded chain type coupling – suitable for Hornby era 1 rolling stock.

A metal chain type coupling with magnet – to mate with Accurascale Chaldrons.

A metal chain with a moulded NEM plug – That can be connected to any piece of rolling stock that has an NEM pocket.

×××××××××

A couple of things I note from this

1) The Development team had already updated the Web team, and it had not been fully rolled out to the public. Am I too impatient or is Hornby not managing expectations properly? Probably both.

2) I think R30346 Locomotion No.1 will have a fine scale chain peg. This will permit the fine scale chain to attach. Additionally, a chain with magnet will have a link that slips over the peg. This is very similar to the adapter I made quite some time ago.

3) The "metal chain with moulded NEM plug". I think the plug fits into the NEM pocket on your rolling stock. Locomotion will not have a NEM pocket.

Bee

[LTSR_NSE]

Both @Mocassin’s & @Bee’s experiences appear to bear out my earlier comments regarding outsourcing…

Far from ignoring moderator & customer reports of inaccuracies, Hornby personnel are indeed informing the website developers of corrections that need to be made.

However outsourced website developers handle many clients & they prioritise workload by the service level that is purchased (pay more = faster response.)

[Fishmanoz]

Or pay through the nose and still get the same inadequate service as everyone else. Very hard to outsource the incentive the product owner has to get it right.

[Moccasin]

I’d have thought (hoped) that Hornby’s own team would be able to update simple things themselves rather than always having to go through their web developers. It would be very expensive and slow (unnecessarily so) if every time anything needed changing they had to go to a third party.

For example, online sales portals allow vendors to upload their own products, change their pricing, upload images etc.

[LTSR_NSE]

Totally depends upon the service that is purchased:

• website initially configured by 3rd party but then complete control handed over to client in entirety.

• website configured & fully supported by 3rd party (in case of bugs or client screwups) but almost completely maintained by client.

• website configured, supported & maintained by 3rd party, they do everything technical, (including creating new pages etc.) client merely adds information to existing pages/fields/cells etc.

• website almost completely operated by 3rd party - client only updates a couple of very basic pages of topical information.

• website completely operated by 3rd party - client merely informs them of changes to be made.

I worked somewhere that gradually transitioned through all of those stages, as leadership changes resulted in less & less interest/value being placed on in-house personnel who possessed any technical knowledge.

It would be most interesting to know what service Hornby is using, unfortunately simply going by limited contextual proof-reading & alteration/correction timescales, it appears to be one the least in-house options. 🙁