murphaph

I have to practice on one first. Maybe I'll do a certain one that Catzilla destroyed and send it back to its owner filthy!

In that case he has reversed his names to fit in with the Irish way of doing it. Best of luck to him. Great to see a new online model retailer in Ireland.

Gabor can be a given name or a family name. My wife's cousin is a Gabor (given name). Her Hungarian teacher is Mrs. Gabor (family name). So take your pick lol. But my German/Hungarian wife says it's almost certainly his given name so as not to confuse locals who would be unfamiliar with the way Hungarians do it.

Right, this is the final update on these 111s. They are "finished" now after I applied the glossy touches to the oily/greasy bits like the wheel bearing journals, fuel tanks, exhaust ports etc. Nameplates will someday be applied whenever Steve at Railtec has made them available. Should be trivial to apply them and weather lightly then. I didn't want to leave them in a million pieces waiting for them to arrive. This has been my most ambitious respray with a number of false starts and dead ends. I probably stripped these locos back to plastic three times, including after having applied the transfers as I was so unsatisfied with the large logo as a transfer. That sent me down the path of laser cutting out masks and I learned a bit from that too. In the end though I am really pleased with how they've turned out.

I strongly suspect he would have little interest in it to be honest. He'd be bombarded with "when is x coming out?" questions, the answers to which he probably doesn't know himself yet.

The announcement of the babies came well after the 201s, mk3s and mk2's were announced, didn't it? Hattons just threw that page up. PM maybe didn't explicitly inform them of the baby run. Perhaps it's not a huge run and he's confident they will sell out through IRM and Marks? Brexit has surely added an extra headache that PM maybe doesn't need.

I will be in for more IR ones and green and silver ones whenever they do come out. A46 was as far as we know a unique livery, is that still the received wisdom? If so we should obviously not expect that livery to appear again unless it's A46 again.

Great Summary John. Thanks! I have wondered previously what the comparisons are like. It's very interesting that there's no RTR equivalents to MM and IRM despite the high level of interest in the hobby. I suppose the Irish manufacturers have a GB market to tap into too, as many of the MM locos obviously ended up there. Most eBay auctions of MM locos seem to be from GB based sellers anyway. A hypothetical NZ manufacturer would presumably be almost entirely reliant on sales within NZ. 44 operational steam locos is an incredible number. I'm very impressed by that! I wonder was it more difficult to scrap them than it was for Irish owners who could send them to Hammond Lane for easy onward shipments to steel plants in Britain. I wonder did NZ's remoteness depress the scrap value of those locos to a point where it made no sense cutting them up in the first place. It seems that although NZ does have a (fairly unique!) domestic steel industry, it came very late and the furnaces used are not like those in traditional plants that use iron ore mined from the ground. Those canny Kiwis developed a way to make steel from sand: https://teara.govt.nz/en/iron-and-steel

Stephen I'm wondering have you just sent the price of pre-owned A's tumbling or skyrocketing

I don't believe it sold. I think it was withdrawn.

If folks come into the hobby they should seek out the information that is available mostly on this forum about upcoming releases. I don't have an awful lot of sympathy for folks who just go on eBay and bid like crazy for instant gratification. I have been guilty of this on one occasion in the past when I paid €250 for a baby GM (it was the most I ever paid for a loco by a good margin and I bought it because it was the last of the 9 tippex babies so I thought, feck it) but I didn't feel ripped off or anything. The seller didn't force me to buy it. I would not have expected him to sell it to me for less. But these two 071s that finished up yesterday are record breakers are they not? The 112 finished up at €593. Is that not the most ever paid (publicly) for one of these? I don't recall one going for this much before. ISTR €450 being the ceiling previously. So there's the interest from that perspective, the "how high can prices go" perspective. I am always curious to see what stuff goes for. I always watch Irish stuff almost out of morbid curiosity so I understand these threads and get a bit of enjoyment of of them if I'm honest

How popular is the hobby in NZ John? More popular than at home? Hamburg Hbf doesn't look much but it's the busiest station in Germany and second busiest in Europe by passenger numbers. Bit of a dark horse. Most people assume either Cologne or Munich are busier.

That would be very difficult to police I guess. I know at least two members on here who buy large quantities of new locos etc. and they are all for personal use. I'm sure there are more. They might sell the odd item later but they weren't bought speculatively. I have sold a few bits recently that I bought as fallbacks. I want to model ca 1995 but as I came back into the hobby late I mostly missed the IE mk2d's, only managing to get 1 rake together from various sources, before the prices went out of my (wife's) budget. So I bought some ST ones instead, thinking I will be able to add the lining and whatnot to make them suitable. Then PM announced the run of IR mk2d's with 21mm bogies as standard, so I sold all my ST stuff. I don't know how much PM is going to charge for the new run, so I sold my stock for what the market would bear. All the money will be going back into future releases. I did the same with the initial fert run, bought two rakes but then the fert were re-run and I bought those instead. I will eventually sell one of my original run duplicate rakes. At the time I simply didn't know that we could more or less reckon with re-runs every few years from IRM. I don't buy duplicates from IRM anymore because of this. I don't buy duplicate locos at all because of the cost but I will buy some duplicate mk2d's as the rerun is unlikely any time soon. PM has a different business model. The lesson here is, buy anything you even think you might want when it is on sale retail. You will be able to recoup what you paid if you change your mind. The market seems to grow with each new locomotive release. I expect the baby GM re-run will bring yet more people into the hobby, who will then start scouring the second hand market for rolling stock and so the cycle continues. It's tough for the newcomers but patience is a virtue.

I think we are drawing to a close on these thankfully. Time to move on to the next project

I've probably not run my A's long enough to see the failure George. I am interested to hear what it turns out to be though. Hopefully just a dry joint somewhere in the chain. Have you tried a different decoder first? The ESU stay alives are a three wire job I think so in theory the decoder could be gone bad as well. It's not a simple capacitor connected across the potential of the rails AFAIK. There's a bit more too it because big fat capacitors work as stay alives but they also swallow the ack pulses from the motor when programming so they have to be switched out of the circuit then. The three wire ones use some charging and discharging circuitry on the decoder and therefore don't need to be isolated during programming like simple caps do.

Yeah except with the addition of roof grime and soot. Otherwise I think the same.

Bit more weathering before the sealer coat goes on:

Hello and welcome to the forum. Great to have you here

Weathering the resprayed 111s some more. Not quite done but not far off now:

Amazing work and the weathered version is far better looking to me too! It just adds so much realism.

Lovely atmosphere.

Everything has been said that I wanted to say but still felt the need to comment, it's just so good!

Use an enamel wash and you will have hours of working time. You can also just make something similar using oil paints + turps but the drying time will be even longer than with enamels. You can buy ready made enamel washes. Then take off with a cotton bud (after it has dried a bit, maybe an hour or overnight) or those make up sponge things. I think they are for mascara. You can use turps or similar to more aggressively remove (assuming your paintjob is acrylic and not oil or enamel based). Edit: Your models are great but with the stratification you are maybe always going to struggle with washes pooling in those layers where they wouldn't in reality.

Amazingly well done. The backdrop blends in completely seamlessly!

I will take these if still available