September Railway Modeller

Railway of the Month is Winchester Railway Modellers' 0 gauge finescale 'Abbotstone', with some beautiful pre-Grouping locomotives and rolling stock.  Other layouts visited are Shipley Model Railway Society's 4mm finescale 'Leicester South (GC)', with excellent buildings, Paul Marshall-Potter's 00 rural 'Albion Yard, Cinderford', John Harker's N gauge 'Goathland', based on the preserved North Yorkshire Moors Railway, Oxford MRC's vintage 00 'Rewley Road', Steve Fackrell's Western Region TT 'Hennock' and Colin Campbell's 00 Southern Region 'Ancol Spa',    Plan of the Month is called 'From Ashleigh to Fisherrow' and is based on a line in Southeast Scotland.

Practical articles include, modular baseboards, customising proprietary coaches, a brake van conversion in 00, modelling a rail served pier, electrofrog pointwork and drawings for a lakeland station.

Model reviews include Dapol's new N gauge Class 56, Hornby's streamlined NRM Duchess of Hamilton and 'Britannia' William Shakespeare, the Graham Farish Class 350 EMU and FNA wagons, OO Works' 1698 Class 2F 0-6-0, Bachmann's Class 108 DMUs and Mk1 Pullman cars, Dapol's 00 and N gauge signals, TMC/Bachmann Mk1 horse box and Metcalfe signal boxes.  There is also a listing of Dapol's proposed new models.

Hornby B17

A short while ago, the question was asked - 'What has happened to the Hornby Class B17?' At the time Simon Kohler was away and I suggested an answer based on the limited knowledge I had.  Simon is now back and has provided the following explanation:

Hornby announced the B17 in 2010 and at that time the project was placed into the hands of one of our new vendors, who had already proved their worth with other new Hornby locomotives. The development initially went well and we had working engineering samples in September, but after this the whole project seemed to slow to an almost unbelievable crawl. Hornby have development engineers in China continuously and a great deal of their time was spent working with the vendor’s engineers to overcome the various problems that seemed to crop up. These problems did not revolve around the models as such but more the manufacture. Eventually, by mid-2011 it became apparent that the problem was with the liquidity of the manufacturer and once aware of this fact we removed the tooling immediately. Once removed, we then made plans to place them with a manufacturer with whom we had worked for many years. Of course when this happens you discover that each manufacturer works differently from the last and that the whole manufacturing development has to start from scratch.

We have received several running and decoration samples recently and are extremely pleased with the results, with an expectation of deliveries commencing in October, however, before I confirm this, I really want to see them being loaded onto a boat with the boxes marked “Hornby”!!

Kindest regards

Simon