ElectroLove - Our Electrostar Timetable Confirmed!

[Warbonnet]

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the Electrostar project, it’s that sometimes the word “complex” doesn’t quite do justice to a project.

The good news is that we’re now firmly into the final stages of development, and we wanted to give you a proper update on where things stand.

So, where are we at? 

The Electrostar family is anything but straightforward. Different formations, liveries, interiors, equipment, lighting arrangements, underframes and all the other little details have resulted in a huge amount of electronics work and decoration plates being required.

Our most experienced staff have now spent multiple months working through these, checking, correcting and refining all those little details that make the difference between a model that looks right and one that merely looks vaguely like an Electrostar after a long day.

We’re now on the final details with decoration plates almost complete. 

Once those are complete, we can get them off to the Electrostar factory and start producing the decorated samples.

But there’s a little more to it…

As if the decoration wasn’t complicated enough, there’s also the small matter of the electronics.

The PCB for the Electrostar is an exceptionally complex piece of development, and ESU are currently working through the final stages of getting this completed.

In fact, it’s one of the most complex projects they’ve undertaken.

The good news is that a lot of the technology behind it builds upon the work being carried out for our IRM ICR project, which we're also getting ready to share more details about, including the decoration and technical specification.

We’re currently hoping to have the Electrostar PCB very soon, but this is one part of the project where we’re necessarily in the hands of ESU. Until that final piece of the puzzle is ready, we can’t put everything together and press the big green button marked “GO!”

The Electrostar factory and the race to the samples

Once the PCB is available, we'll be working closely with the Electrostar factory to get the decorated samples produced as quickly as possible.

We're working closely with the Electrostar factory to get the decorated samples produced as quickly as possible.

The Electrostar decorated samples are very much the culmination of the development process; with testing of elements happening before hand. It's the finishing point of the process, not the starting point. 

Once those samples have been produced, checked and signed off, they can move into production relatively quickly.

That's good news for us — because we've lost some time waiting for the electronics, and we don't intend to waste any more than we absolutely have to!

The complexity of the Electrostar means these aren't going to be samples we can knock out overnight, though. We're therefore currently aiming to have the decorated samples in early 2027.

And there is a little bit of good news in the delay…

With the project taking a little longer than originally planned, we've also been able to use some of that additional development time to look at some new digital features for the Electrostar.

We’re not quite ready to spill the beans on those just yet — because, naturally, we’d like to have them properly finalised before we start shouting about them!

However, we’ll have more news on these in the new year, when we can reveal exactly what we've been working on.

So, at least there is a small silver lining to the extra time involved in getting this project over the line!

So when will they arrive?

Putting all of this together, we're now working towards mid-2027 for shipment of the Electrostar models.

We appreciate that this is slightly later than the timescale we originally hoped for, and we're very conscious that many of you have been waiting patiently for these models.

But this isn't a project where we want to cut corners simply to hit an arbitrary date.

The Electrostar is an incredibly complicated model, and with so many different versions and configurations being produced, there is a lot going on behind the scenes. We'd rather spend the time getting all of those details right than discover six months later that we've missed something which was staring us in the face all along!

There’s still work to do, but we’re now very much on the final lap.

And after all the time, effort, spreadsheets, drawings, emails, samples, corrections and probably an unhealthy amount of coffee that has gone into this project, we're looking forward to finally seeing these things looking like and operating like Electrostars rather than an extremely complicated collection of plastic bits! 

Thanks, as always, for your patience and continued support.

Pre-Order Your Electrostar Here!

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