Heljan have just announced that the following items are planned / under development with delivery scheduled from 2010 onwards:
4mm OO-SCALE
4-wheel railbuses (due 2010/11) Waggon & Maschinen 4-wheel railbus (E79960-4) Wickham 4-wheel railbus (SC79965-9) Park Royal 4-wheel railbus (M79970-4) AC Cars 4-wheel railbus (W79975-9)
Class 52 (in very small 2010 production runs) D1000 Western Enterprise (desert sand) D1001 Western Pathfinder (maroon) D1012 Western Firebrand (maroon) D1023 Western Fusilier (blue)
Class 23 'Baby Deltic' (4-character headcode model in blue & green - late
2010).
B&RCW 'Lion' prototype (2011 release).
7mm O-SCALE (2010/11)
Class 55 'Deltic' in post-1967 condition green & blue liveries
"John Turner" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@supernews.com:
Brilliant idea, I'm surprised no-one else has thought of it before to be honest. I suspect that the basic mechanism for all 4 can be similar and would suit a lot of green period modellers as a branch line on a larger layout, or a small layout or even diorama. Plus being small, I suspect they are likely to be on the affordable side compared to other options, especially at the moment.
I knew about the Deltics and the Lion, but not about the railbuses! Do they all have the same wheelbase I wonder as it seems strange that they are making four different types? I guess Heljan have now decided that they are going to concentrate on obscure prototypes that the big boys are unlikely to produce.
This is vindictive actions by a big company ! I've only recently got the Airfix 4-wheeled railbus running to my satisfaction, spent a fortune on DCC decoder for it, etc.. And someone is going to have a much better detailed one out of a box !
I built the Airfix one but didn't motorise it. The only ones I saw and rode in are the German ones on the Worth Valley. They were an order of magnitude better than the Pacers.
But what I did ride in as a boy, were the horrible BUT 4-wheeled units on the Wealdstone-Belmont shuttle.
LOL! It's always the way! I'd just built up my fleet of tender-drive Hornby locos and associated rolling stock in the 1990s when the new superdetailed models were announced.
I've had an Airfix/Dapol railbus kit for years but have never assembled it. Motorising kits are (or used to be) available.
The Worth Valley is, I believe, limited to 25mph. I'm sure they'd be pretty rough at Pacer speeds, e.g. on the 11-mile stretch between Shipley and Leeds. I can remember in the early days of DMUs riding at the rear of a lightly-loaded one doing 75mph on the Hull-Leeds run. Bouncy? Bouncy!
I cant help buying 4F's despite it being the most likely to be upgraded soon. Latest was an almost completed Wills kit for GBP25, but as its got Romford wheels tis worth that for them alone.
I've a L&Y battery electric finished apart from the lining (daunting prospect, probably going to learn print-your-own decals for this job) and lettering. Its from the High Level kit, with various electronic gizmos added. I think those are sufficiently obscure to be safe !
Motorising the Airfix for me has been an exercise in cost explosions. It resembles a government computer project !
Railbus, cost at most £3. Motorising kit and interior kit (Branchlines), probable cost circa £35, bought those bits ages ago. DCC chips (Lenz Gold and PM1 power module) £70. My £3 Airfix kit has come in at about £110. But it does run well and the PM1 guarantees it doesn't stall which is necessary for a four wheeled vehicle running an automatic shuttle service.
Prototype anecdotes:
I think at preserved line speeds they ride quite well, but that's ~25mph. I don't think they will ride so well at 50mph.
When a teenager I occaisionally travelled to the railway at Sherringham, Norfolk, for working parties.
One year a Keighley driver was there to drive the N.Norfolk's service railbus(*). Unfortunately, he forgot the line rule about not stopping this particular railbus' engine at lunchtime as the battery charging from the engine was suspect. My job for the rest of the day was supervising several hundred feet of extension cable and a hefty battery charger. Initially enough to get to the railbus to start it, then at station stops a bit more charge to help the gearbox along. I think it had most of the gears back by the end of the afternoon. Thinking back, I wonder if the intermediate charges had much effect on the battery compared to charging off the engine, but it was obviously needed for the initial starting.
It made a welcome change from painting wagon solebars or shovelling ballast !
(* the NN had two at the time, one in normal service, and the other exquisitly restored and only used with very trusted passengers).
I've just had an idea... I'm going to find a Heljan loco box and put the Airfix one in that. Watch the collectors scream at me to sell the "pre-release" example :-)
What's missing - for pretty well every railway - is the ubiquitous 0-6-0 tender engine (the GW is, IIRC, the only one to be reasonably covered, with the - rather elderly- Dean Goods from Hornby: the likes of 4Fs, Q1s and J39s being rather large - and late - to really cut it).
So, as a starter?
NER: C/C1 (J21) - they don't get more ubiquitous than those things.. L&NW: Coal engine or Cauliflower (Special DX proably too much to ask.. ;) Midland: Kirtley, though a Johnson engine would probably be easier to model.. L&SW: Adams 700 (that would make the western-section SR entirely modellable with RTR only, something that no pre-nationalisation railway is at present..[1])
other examples will no doubt occur (Highland / Caledonian Jumbos, for example..), but those would serve. There are any numbr of NER lines you could quite happily run with nothing but Cs..
[1] Well, you'd need to find a green N class mogul: Bachmann don't seem to do 'em in anything other than BR black now. Why?
Ditto, without the electronic gizmos. I didn't spring this one though...
Printing your own decals is a hobby in itself. Well, it is with an Alps printer like what I've got. I never got on with inkjet decals. Actually, with a decent bow pen lining with that is far more satisfying. I was lucky enough to get a second hand Kern bowpen off eBay, and the difference in using that compared to the sort of bowpen you get in the typical compass sets from WH Smith is incredible. With just a little practise I was able to get three distinct lines within a millimetre - that's about 0.2mm line with 0.2mm gap between them. I can't get that on the Alps!
: : I've just had an idea... : I'm going to find a Heljan loco box and put the Airfix one in that. Watch : the collectors scream at me to sell the "pre-release" example :-) :
What, and have Pete Water(works)man accuse Heljan of intellectual property theft?!...
It is old technology, but there is still a thriving user base. There are still people using these for commercial purposes, including at least a couple producing model railway decals. The wise have a spare stock of printers and a healthy stock of ribbons to go with them. I have a "new" MD-1000 in the garage as my spare, with an MD-1300 sitting about 1 foot from my left hand as I type. I felt compelled to try printing my own decals after being ripped off by a decal maker in North Wales.
It's shame the Alps printers are obsolete, but the inkjet market overtook them and they just couldn't keep up. The photo printing quality is bloody awful!
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