Railways Blog

Graham Farish have announced What’s New for 2006.

• BR 3MT Standard 2-6-2 Tank
• LMS Jubilee
• Class 04 Diesel Shunter
• Class 150 DMU
• LMS Stanier coaches (5 types)
• OBA Open
• Bogie Bolster “C”
• TTA 4-wheel Oil Tank
• POA Open “box”
• 12t Ventilated Van
• “Seacow” bogie ballast wagon
• New 40′ and 20′ containers for the freightliner flat

On paper (or electrons), it’s an impressive list. But when you consider that many of the promised 2005 items have yet to materialise, it makes we wonder when, or perhaps even if, we’ll see all these items. Past experience has made me cynical; the class 60 locomotive has been in the catalogue for something like three years, and the 66 took almost the same length of time to appear before Dapol forced their hand.

Some of them are predictable shrinkings of their 00 range. I find the TTA particularly welcome; the existing Peco model is getting very long in the tooth now, and isn’t available in any modern liveries.

One can’t help but notice that several items, including the 04, the 150, the Stanier coaches and the Seacow were once proposed by Dapol, and I can only assume this is payback for the 66. Dapol have since announced that they’re going to abandon these models in the light of the Farish announcements. It’s also been said that they’d done little or no work so far on them, so haven’t wasted a lot of money.

Specially for Michael, a shot of the Blonay-Chamby steam railway in Switzerland, taken last summer. The train stopped just before the bridge, and they let those of us with cameras disembark, troop along the narrow walkway, and photograph the train slowly puffing across the viaduct. The Health and Safety Commision would have kittens if any British preserved line attempted something like that!

The metre-gauge Blonay-Chamby line runs for about three miles in the hills above Lake Geneva, with connections at both ends to other metre-gauge lines. The line closed and was taken over by preservationists in the 1960s, and they retained the overhead electrification, which is still live, as they also run a lot of preserved electric railcars.

The loco is an ex Furka Oberalp rack-and-adhesion 2-6-0T, although there are no rack sections on this line.

Commenter Temple Stark finds it amusing that Britain has a train company called Virgin Trains, and asks if there are any pictures of them pounding hard into tunnels? Well, you asked….

Dapol generated an enormous amount of hype by declaring a week ago they’d be making a major product announcement at noon today. This is what they finally announced:

During mid 2005 Dapol announced that we would be releasing Stanier Coaches in N gauge at the Warley 2006 Show.

However, due to customer comment, feedback and demand we have decided to postpone this model and instead we have decided to manufacture a series of GRESLEY COACHES.

Already at the early stages of production, these models are being produced using brand new tools, and will be released at the Warley 2006 Show.

Initial body designs will be 3rd Class, 1st Class and Brake Composite. Buffet cars will also be included but ‘Sleepers’ are still under review.

As with all Dapol N gauge Coaches, the models will have highly detailed interiors and will be produced with a range of alternative running numbers to enable our customers to create a pro-typical rake.

However, Dapol would like to involve customers in the choice of the actual livery to be initially produced. There are of course three main liveries to consider:

Teak : BR Maroon : BR Crimson and Cream.

Therefore Dapol have added an extra section within our ‘Contact page’ below, where customers vote for their own particular favourite choice of livery. We must state however, that we can only except one vote per person.

By mid 2006, Dapol will collect all of the comments and will make the ‘most requested’ livery as their initial model. Furthermore, from all of the ‘most requested’ responses received, Dapol will randomly select one customer and will present to that person one of each of the initial release of Gresley Coaches.

As with all Dapol models, regular updates of its progress will be posted on the Dapol website.

Dapol have clearly been looking at the absurd prices that the long-discontinued Minitrix models have been fetching on Ebay. If that’s the case, I would expect the maroon livery to appear first.

Strictly speaking, such kettle-era coaches are a little outside of my chosen time period; although I have seen pictures of maroon Gresley coaches behind a class 52 “Western” in Devon. It’s hoped they will be doing the Buffet in Blue/Grey, which actually outlasted the Westerns themselves.

There’s a rather alarming front page on Rupert Murdoch’s Times on government proposals for deregulating rail fares.

RAIL fares will more than treble for some journeys under government plans to scrap saver tickets and give private operators greater freedom to set prices, The Times has learnt.

Passengers who are unable to book ahead will have to pay a substantial premium even if they travel during off-peak hours. Many will be forced to buy a standard open return ticket, which, in the case of the London to Manchester route, will cost £202, compared with the saver price of £57.10.

One the face of it, this sounds like the doomsday scenario the opponents of privatisation warned us about. Train passengers have already endured fare rises well above inflation for several years. If there was to be an overnight trebling of petrol prices, there’d be riots in the streets, and the government would fall within a week.

But is the tabloid Times exaggerating things for the cynical purpose of selling newspapers? One commenter on the uk.railway newsgroup has suggested that the journalist writing that piece is a bit of an anti-rail loon, and his speculations should be taken with a pinch of salt.

The Scotsman has a rather more sober analysis, based on actually speaking to the train companies.

A spokesman for Virgin Trains said: “Long-distance operators face intense competition from the private car and airlines. We have found by experience that the best way to meet that competition is by improving train services and offering cheap fares.

“The lowest priced tickets are already unregulated, but are still offering journeys which in real terms are cheaper than they would have been in earlier years.”

Both Virgin and GNER now allow cheap tickets to be booked up to the day before travel.

The Virgin spokesman said: “Sales of advanced purchase cheap tickets have increased substantially since we removed the original deadline of three, seven and 14 days last September.

“But there will always be a place for a reasonable turn-up-and-go fare because one of the great advantages of rail travel in Britain is the ability to just turn up and get on a train.”

It’s also claimed that many peak hour ‘open return’ tickets are absurdly overpriced, with the result that many peak hour trains are actually running half full, and most of the people who do travel on these trains have some kind of discounted ticket. One wonders why a business which still receives substantial government subsidy is allowed to waste resources by running well below capacity in the peaks.

I have to say I don’t totally trust Virgin Trains. I’ve suspected they would dearly love to turn into a ‘grounded airline’ with compulsory reservations for all services, probably accompanied by a byzantine ‘demand-based’ fares scheme. This would be a lot more convenient for the operator, even if it’s far more cumbersome and inflexible for the traveller.

Hopefully, market forces won’t allow them to get away with it, but not being a libertarian ideologue, I don’t totally trust market forces either.

Who else but Mike Knell of Not in Production would write a complaint to South West Trains in verse? A sample:

I stepped forward in order to open the door
(Of a Siemens Desiro of class 444,
As being a bit of a trainspotting wonk
I often recall such irrelevant bunk.)

But the buttons to open the doors were inactive,
And the train just stood silent, Teutonically passive
With no visible guard to beg for admission
(He was probably inside with his head in a Grisham.)

He deserves some SWT travel vouchers for that.

I’m currently being forced to endure yet another three months of the dreaded Rail Replacement Buses on my daily commute, while Network Rail resignals the line. I hope the trains will returning as promised on March 26th.

I sincerely hope that Northern Rail doesn’t follow the bad example of Northern Ireland’s rail operator, who managed this.

The reopening of the rail line between Larne and Belfast after a multi-million pound upgrade has been delayed.

It had been due to restart next Monday but Translink spokesman Mal McGreevy said “higher than anticipated staff turnover” meant this was not possible.

“We have some crewing issues and don’t have enough staff to cover the full range of services,” he said.

The Belfast to Larne commuter line represents a significant percentage of what’s left of Northern Ireland’s rail network, decimated by the dreadfully anti-rail Stormont government in 1950s and 60s. If they really don’t have enough start to operate both it and the rest of the network at the same time, they’re not just a few staff short.

2005 was the year when British outline N turned the corner. British N endured a couple of fallow years after Bachmann took over Graham Farish and relocated production to China. Then N seemed to take a back seat while Bachmann released model after model in OO, many of them rushed in an attempt to beat competition from Hornby. It took the arrival of a new manufacturer, Dapol, to make them pay attention to N. Since then we’ve seen Peco enter the fray, making British N look healthier than it’s been for years. We’ve seen Farish bring out the 170s and 158s with all-new mechanisms, and the Mk1 suburbans and Super BGs with much finer detail than anything produced before. Dapol gave us the GWR 45XX small prairie, rendering the Farish kettle range obsolete in a stroke, as well as the Dogfish ballast hopper, and the six wheel milk tank (but not yet in a diesel era livery, sadly) The year ended with not one, but two class 66s, from Dapol and Graham Farish. I’m hoping next year will bring the promised Peaks and Warships from Farish, as well as the Mk1 coaches in blue and grey, and Dapol will bring out

The Continental scene was the complete opposite, a year of consolidation and retrenchment. I’m told that N is in decline in the European market. Have German houses suddenly started getting bigger? We saw the virtual demise of the Arnold range, dragged down by the collapse of the Lima group, although with the company now owned by Hornby, some models will hopefully come back. We also saw Roco all but abandon N, with nothing save a few reliveries. The year ended with Roco going broke, but being sold to new management with production relocated to eastern Europe. I’m guessing that the ‘reissues’ that appeared towards the end of the year (Orange Eurofima coaches, Italian freight stock) were actually old stock being sold off to free up capital, and weren’t actually new production.

This leaves the ‘Big Two’, Fleischmann and Minitrix. Both released very few completely new models in 2005, concentrating on reliveries.

What will 2006 bring? Here are some of my wishes:

• Minitrix SBB EC stock in the new “Cisalpino” silver/blue colours. Since the common prototypes formation is a six car set made up from two A (first class) and four B (second class), selling them as a set of one A and two Bs would work well.
• Fleischmann BR185 in BLS silver/green livery as a BLS Re485. Since the prototypes tend to hunt in pairs, a powered/unpowered twin set would be nice.
• Hornby to get the Arnold Eurofima coaches in FS Turquoise and Cream back into production. An improved and upgraded BLS “Brown” Re4/4 is probably too much to hope for; the old model is rather long in the tooth both visibly and mechanically.
• The long promised Hobbytrain SBB UIC coaches to finally appear. I need both the Grey/Green EWiv style livery ones, and especially the promised Hupac livery.
• For completely new models, I’d like to see somebody produce the FS Cisalpino Pendolino sets, and at the other end of the spectrum, the modern EMUs used by the BLS and several other private railways.

The infamous Virgin Voyagers’ allergy to seawater strikes again. 160 passengers ended up stranded for three hours on the sea wall at Dawlish. As reported by BBC News

The train involved was stopped at red lights on the sea wall at Dawlish when it was hit by a huge wave – and water got into the electrics.

Needless to say, First Great Western’s 25 year old High Speed Trains, based on reliable old 1970s British Rail technology, continued to run once they’d got the failed Voyager out of the way.