Horsetan wrote: ↑Tue Oct 01, 2024 10:48 am
Who knows what motivates these ideas and the "business decisions" that give them the green light for production? Rapido's timing suggests they saw what Hattons were doing and the orders generated, and decided they wanted some of that for themselves.
After all, "who cares what it looks like as long as it sells?"
It is a bit mad, though, to put in that much time and effort into designing and producing essentially "nonsense" coaches when just a little more effort might have led to some decent models of real pregroup designs.
Oddly, I’d have thought it required less effort in this day and age to take a drawing and produce an accurate CAD drawing from it than it would to imagine something up that is close, but not right.
Unless the goal was try and produce something sufficiently generic as to pass as ‘most’ companies stock with a quick livery change.
As much as I hate to say it, I can see the economic sense to that.
I could see the logic from the manufacturer's point of view, and the logic for a much wider range of modellers, if the models came without the cost-boosting fancy-but-hidden interiors, without detailed but entirely fanciful underframes, and without a luxury price tag for what is only a coarse approximation to any given pre-group coach. The decision to have no vertical panelling/beading to follow the lower parts of the door edges, a very shallow looking band of panelling around the waist, and inevitably "excessively rounded" ends to the panels in that shallow band also destroys the resemblence to the carriages of a number of companies, in which respect I think these projected models follow the unsatisfactory lead of the Hattons Genesis items - although I think those were slightly better as originally conceived, before certain "experts" (who may have had particular pre-group company loyalties) started sending advice to Hattons.
The availability of separate guards lookouts, in a small number of styles, capable of being fitted in a choice of positions, would have helped, at least a little.
As Ivan correctly points out, at the high price, they are not even within the budgets of sensible modellers who might otherwise buy and improve/convert them into something more accurate. Compared to the Genesis items they are probably even too expensive (for me, anyway) to attract buyers who might want approximate representations as a stop-gap pending the construction of truly accurate models.
They'll no doubt sell to those with far more money than they have either modelling time/skills or powers of accurate observation, as well as to those who must have one of everything - or one more than anybody else has.
Most subjects, models and techniques covered in this thread are now listed in various categories on page1
Dec. 2018: Almost all images that disappeared from my own thread following loss of free remote hosting are now restored.
Graeme I am sure this might be a topic for tomorrow at Wakefield.
If collectors wish to purchase these things that is fine. They do not interest me in the slightest because they are models of nothing. If that is what a model railway is about fine.
I am heading to see Dewsbury GN tomorrow, a real location modelled with care.
