murphaph

Oh here's the screenshot from the stream:

Hattons livestream just a few minutes ago revealed that they are vat registered in several (but not all) EU countries including Ireland. This means that post brexit they will continue to charge vat at the point of sale and will presumably ship with a notification that the vat has been or will be paid to the Revenue. I have heard of this sort of setup with some Swiss online shops that charge German vat and the items arrive like other EU stuff in Germany with no interference by customs.

A nice gesture indeed. Reminds me of how my late father used to do business. All his customers got a bottle of whiskey, a box of chocs and a card at Xmas and we'd help wrap them. Don't worry lads I'm not expecting that. My old man only had a couple of dozen customers to worry about lol! I remember it was the only time of the year we'd be in a cash and carry with sweets in it! The IRM card brought back some nice memories for me personally and I know from talking to other customers it was much appreciated across the board. Merry Xmas and a happy and prosperous new year to all at IRM and all the forum members.

Hattons have finally charged me for my 121s in IE livery.

Are the wheeltappers projects based on his own recordings or the ESU files? I believe the MM chip sounds are derived from the ESU recordings of similar US locos but stand open to correction on that. The ESU files for these engines are very good quality HiFi recordings. I just used these files on blank decoders (using a Lokprogrammer) and swapped out the horns. They are full throttle projects (drive hold, Coast etc.).

You should be fine either way. Customs won't have anything to do with parcels going from GB to NI. At least not initially. They will be concerning themselves with lorries of food products not parcels of non-food stuff IMO.

That's bad news. I honestly thought these things would be long since delivered but what with Covid and now Brexit I'm wondering what the hell is going to happen. I see smaller Manchester based sellers on eBay have them. Rails have them. Hattons don't seem to have them. I hope they at least use some common sense and hold off on charging them to our credit cards until the 1st unless they can guarantee that they can get them shipped before the end of the year. I will be mightily annoyed if they charge my credit card on the 31st charging me UK VAT and then exporting them to me in Germany for German customs to stop them and slap another €100 VAT on them (and that would be in the Inc VAT + shipping price). If they have been let down on the supply side there's nothing they can do except use common sense and hold off on billing us in the EU until January and deduct the UK VAT at that time. I've tried asking them to confirm that they will do this but they seem unwilling to do so.

The comments on Hornby's tweet are also "interesting". It's all Hornby's fault according to certain people on there. They failed to prepare you see.

Trying out the 121s:

Lovely space. I hope the electrician is going to put an alarm on it

But the As at least had a fairly "orthodox" red/white-red/white configuration, right? The as delivered 121s seem to have had this "weird" red/white-white/white configuration and this seems to be reflected in the model, but how were these illuminated is the question. Where all three white lights on simultaneously? Given the As predate these locos and were fairly standard it seems a really odd departure. Wikipedia example of B126:

But looking at pics on the net there were twin twin arrangements too, but were they white/white on one side and if so were both these lights actually illuminated simultaneously? I think the 121s had a crazy mix of lighting arrangements. Many pics show a lamp on the lamp iron on that side with the white/white (assuming the model is correct) side. It looks like they standardised on the 141s and later 071s with red/white - white however, but the 121s seem to be a real Mish mash.

Did B121 really have this red/white white/white configuration and if so were the white/white lights both illuminated like that?

This intuitively feels wrong when I look at any other pictures of the early marker lights. They were usually a twin red/white on one side and a single white on the other. But I don't have any pictures in any of my books of this loco in delivery condition.

It'll all be running under Rocrail. No stand alone controller per se. I'm guessing any controller has to use POM (possibly in the background) to achieve this because the decoders with an advanced consist address don't respond to throttle or direction commands on their native addresses and to individually shunt them together for coupling you'd certainly need to address them individually before giving them both the same advanced consist address.

Yeah I'm using blank Loksounds with the ESU 8-567CR file modified to use Irish horns so drive hold is all set up. The downside the advanced consisting seems to be that the locos only respond to the consist address (which annoyingly is limited to the simple address space) so you can't shunt locos together and build a consist on the layout without using POM to program the shunted loco with a consist address after it's been coupled up to the other one.

To those consisting these locos: Are you using the advanced consisting features of the decoders or just flipping the direction of operation of one loco using CV29, bit 5? I watched an American video where the guy suggested that drive hold doesn't work unless you use the advanced consisting? That didn't sound right to me but I'm happy to hear of your experiences.

Yeah I reckon patience is key here. Over xmas not much will happen anyway.

Oh that's a shame. Who gave you that information? I certainly won't be returning for refund as these things are all sold out now.

Hmm, I'm in Germany and the issues are really just these very minor cosmetic things (little plastic bits) that I can stick back on myself if I had them. No speaker or LED problems that need major surgery or anything like that. I'm kind of happy they didn't sustain even more damage on the way here now that I see just how fragile they are to be honest so I don't want to post stuff back to Dublin or Hattons. It can't really be cheaper for MM to do it this way than to just post me a few bits of plastic I'm sure, even if he just sends them straight back to China for rework (which I assume sure his contract with the manufacturer allows). I can even provide a Dublin postal address so we'd be talking about the price of an envelope and a stamp to sort me out.

So I took the other IR 121s out of their boxes and I also have damage. need 2 vac bags and a cab end facing horn and on 133 the packer even managed to break the NEM pocket so the TLC droops and is about to fall off. The handrails are also snapped off (I really think this handrails should have been included separately or at least there should have been foam between handrail and body like on all previous handrailed models. I wonder why this was omitted here. What's the consensus on where to request spare parts? I don't want to ship the locos back as there's every possibility they will sustain more damage in transit and I feel perfectly comfortable replacing these things myself (and that's surely much cheaper for MM of course). Contact the retailer directly or is it cheaper for MM to post these bits out to me? Edit: I have no LED or sound issues to report which is good. The external cosmetic stuff is easier to set right.

Thanks a mil. Much appreciated.

Thx! So there was a simple pair of switches for each colour at each end (4 switches in total) or was it an on switch for all the marker lights and then a colour selector toggle switch for each end?

Does anyone know what the driver was presented with vis a vis the switches for the marker lights? Was there one switch to turn on all marker lights and then another to cut out the feed to the rear red ones when running in consist or when hauling a train or were there there two independent switches or were there even 4 switches, one for each end/colour? I'm setting up a decoder and while I won't be able to replicate things exactly it would be nice to have an approximation.

Ah yes of course some rewiring would be required but I had already assumed that, sorry. I realise not everyone is comfortable with a soldering iron.