The new models to be developed by Bachmann over the next 18 months or so were announced at the London Toy Fair and feature in a news story HERE
There were plenty of examples of yet to be released products on display at the London Toy Fair and of course many of these are pre-production samples are not up to production standards. When viewing the images in the gallery you should take this into account. Yes thats right. The models will be even better than in the pictures!
The picture gallery showing all the hottest most wanted Bachmann product is through the link below:-
Gallery of Products at the London Toy Fair
Bachmann provided delivery schedules and other information for several of their locomotives and items of rolling stock:-
Ivatt 2MT 2-6-0 loco - June
BR Class 4MT 2-6-0 loco - Junish
Class 47 Diesel Loco - May June
Class 150 - Not dropped
Hoppers - Not far away
After Dennis Lovett had kindly offered to open up the cabinets to permit pictures to be taken we sat down and much of discussion was taken up by how inaccurate models really are! Apparently rivet counters have got it entirely wrong. Every loco has different numbers of rivets in different places. The loco built on a Monday would have rivets more tightly spaced than the loco built on a Friday! When you are next at a Crewe Steam Festival and you have several identical lcomotives side by side check it out for yourself!
Paint is another big issue among modellers. We were fortunate to have Padraig Murphy of Murphy Models at the table who is Ireland's leading distributer of Irish ready to run locomotives and rolling stock (More on this in another topic). Mr Murphy was giving us examples of locomotives in Ireland which had two colour schemes on each side of the loco. Apparently a lot of locomotives in Ireland run East to West and back and there are no turntables. This means that like the moon one side of the loco is in constant sunlight and one side in constant shadow. The same for coaches and wagons of course. Now just imagine what this does to the locos paintwork! And these same locos do the same run for several years.
And in the old days paint colours were mixed by hand. No computers. There was absolutely no gaurantee that the next batch of paint would be the match exactly the shade that you were working with. And because the air was contaminated with soot the paint inevitably became darker as it got towards the boittom of the tin. So a coach may well have several shades of paint on one side and thats even before it has seen the light of day!
And paint runs were common when the livery was applied. Nothing was perfect. Paint would dribble everywhere. And then you get the effects of bird excrement as you are painting. You can't wipe it off so you mix it in to the paint. Now you can imagine what effect this has on the area thats been painted.
Next time you hear somebody tell you the paint colour is wrong you know what to do! Just tell them about the bird ****
There are two preserved Fairburn tanks built at the same factory. Yet they both have entirely different dimensions! One has a boiler 40mm longer than the other and it is impossible to swap the boilers over which the owners were planning to do as part of an overhaul. Now when checking prototypes what do you do when you discover dimensional differences in the same class that you are going to model? Some modeller somewhere will either say the boiler is too short or the boiler is too long! And this has been claimed for the same model!
You can guess that an interesting discussion was had by all and I would like to thank both Padraig and Dennis for keeping me entertained for longer than they should have!
Hopefully this goes some way to helping you to understand why models take as long as they take to produce. More time is spent working out compromises and head scratching than in actually building the pre-production sample of every model Bachmann bring you!
Happy modelling
Gary
There were plenty of examples of yet to be released products on display at the London Toy Fair and of course many of these are pre-production samples are not up to production standards. When viewing the images in the gallery you should take this into account. Yes thats right. The models will be even better than in the pictures!
The picture gallery showing all the hottest most wanted Bachmann product is through the link below:-
Gallery of Products at the London Toy Fair
Bachmann provided delivery schedules and other information for several of their locomotives and items of rolling stock:-
Ivatt 2MT 2-6-0 loco - June
BR Class 4MT 2-6-0 loco - Junish
Class 47 Diesel Loco - May June
Class 150 - Not dropped
Hoppers - Not far away
After Dennis Lovett had kindly offered to open up the cabinets to permit pictures to be taken we sat down and much of discussion was taken up by how inaccurate models really are! Apparently rivet counters have got it entirely wrong. Every loco has different numbers of rivets in different places. The loco built on a Monday would have rivets more tightly spaced than the loco built on a Friday! When you are next at a Crewe Steam Festival and you have several identical lcomotives side by side check it out for yourself!
Paint is another big issue among modellers. We were fortunate to have Padraig Murphy of Murphy Models at the table who is Ireland's leading distributer of Irish ready to run locomotives and rolling stock (More on this in another topic). Mr Murphy was giving us examples of locomotives in Ireland which had two colour schemes on each side of the loco. Apparently a lot of locomotives in Ireland run East to West and back and there are no turntables. This means that like the moon one side of the loco is in constant sunlight and one side in constant shadow. The same for coaches and wagons of course. Now just imagine what this does to the locos paintwork! And these same locos do the same run for several years.
And in the old days paint colours were mixed by hand. No computers. There was absolutely no gaurantee that the next batch of paint would be the match exactly the shade that you were working with. And because the air was contaminated with soot the paint inevitably became darker as it got towards the boittom of the tin. So a coach may well have several shades of paint on one side and thats even before it has seen the light of day!
And paint runs were common when the livery was applied. Nothing was perfect. Paint would dribble everywhere. And then you get the effects of bird excrement as you are painting. You can't wipe it off so you mix it in to the paint. Now you can imagine what effect this has on the area thats been painted.
Next time you hear somebody tell you the paint colour is wrong you know what to do! Just tell them about the bird ****
There are two preserved Fairburn tanks built at the same factory. Yet they both have entirely different dimensions! One has a boiler 40mm longer than the other and it is impossible to swap the boilers over which the owners were planning to do as part of an overhaul. Now when checking prototypes what do you do when you discover dimensional differences in the same class that you are going to model? Some modeller somewhere will either say the boiler is too short or the boiler is too long! And this has been claimed for the same model!
You can guess that an interesting discussion was had by all and I would like to thank both Padraig and Dennis for keeping me entertained for longer than they should have!
Hopefully this goes some way to helping you to understand why models take as long as they take to produce. More time is spent working out compromises and head scratching than in actually building the pre-production sample of every model Bachmann bring you!
Happy modelling
Gary
