Mainline - Cheap for a reason?

[GeraldH]

I do like my Mainline locos, but they are high maintenance and a very risky proposition nowadays. The one Mainline loco that I would avoid at all costs is the 43XX. Lovely loco, but a significant proportion of the production run have mazak rot . The four that I have had experience of were strangely much worse on one side of the split chassis than the other. This probably explains why there are quite a few bodies for sale on Ebay.

[heda]

I recently bought a Collett on ebay for less that £20 including postage, not expecting much having read this thread before buying but as I'm just starting out on OO gauge I thought maybe I could make something of it and at worse it wouldn't be a fortune lost.
When it arrived it looked a bit tatty, had a lot of use and not really looked after, but I gave it a run and it was so smooth even at crawling speed. It looks better having had some black marker pen applied to the wheels and rods. How long it will run for who knows but at the moment it is by far the best of the few loco's I have.
Dave

[Bigmet]

Being a relatively light mechanism it will probably have decent life, if carefully handled.

The working principle is good, and while the construction is in decent condition the resulting running is fine. Unfortunately the construction employs some low cost technique, and once degraded due to wear processes, performance takes a dive...

[JasonR]

I know this is a fairly old thread, but I thought I'd post a word of caution when it comes to buying second hand Mainline stuff...

Always look at the bottom of the chassis... if there is a cross cut roughly in the plastic or scratched in the metal, then the item was a factory reject... these were often sold on at very low prices (50p for locos!) to staff members at Palitoy, or ended up on the famous Palitoy tip, from where they (and many Action Men) would be "rescued" by such as myself and other Coalville people...

An even older thread now, but, as I'm from Coalville, I need to ask - Where was this "famous Palitoy tip"?

[Bigmet]

I have not a clue, but since you are native to Coalville, you are in as good a position as any to find out. However, within our extended family there's a guy that at one time traded Palitoy Star Bores product, and in his younger years he put in some time trying to find where Palitoy had dumped items. The conclusions he reached were:
1. Multiple dump locations, and that those involved in the dumping had already picked over and salvaged anything worthwhile.
2. Dump sites were typically small scale, on private land and now not identifiable.
3. Development around Coalville was covering (so by now, over 20 years on, has covered) some of the sites.

Frankly I feel you will do as well digging up any garden around a Coalville house that was home to children from the seventies onwards. The haul from my current back garden includes a Corgi Mustang, the left leg of what must be an out-of-Action Man, and the bottom half of a Princess Layer Cake; and has yielded a plentiful supply of Lone Star bits and pieces, this having been our local toy manufactory about 3 miles away, which leaked like the proverbial sieve.

[Bufferstop]

Factory scrap appearing on unofficial dumping spots is usually down to some c*ck-up that needs to be hidden from management, the perpetrator is usually told for **** sake lose it. My late father worked for the research and development division of a major midlands engineering firm. At one time they were in an old building alongside the canal and were learning the hard way how to mass produce turbine blades for Rolls Royce. When there were some embarrassments to hide before the gaffers came in next day, guess where they ended up! It was a pretty hard winter in 62-63 and one morning on the way in he looked over the side of the bridge to see 30 slightly wonky blades standing to attention in the frozen snow which lay over the ice on the canal.

[JasonR]

Thanks guys.

@Bigmet,
I have already asked around the town, but my enquiries are often met with strange looks. Perhaps they think I'm off my tree on controlled substances... The joys of being young and getting typecast...
I have located one possible dump site a little way out of town (I collect old bottles, so I might be doubly successful, who knows?).

I did find in my own back garden last year, a couple of old metal cars and a little Matchbox double decker bus (Yay!).

@Bufferstop,
I can just imagine that!
Did they get away with it?

[Bufferstop]

@Bufferstop,
I can just imagine that!
Did they get away with it?

They must have, they were still around to remember the incident 20 years later. Strangely by another canal by which time it was narrowboats suffering from prop shaft trouble, they'd obviously cracked the fan blade problems and moved on to automotive drivelines.

[Bigmet]

...Did they get away with it?

In 'the good old days' most of the time. But then came the Quality Management revolution in the 1970s driven by the pressure of Japanese competition, Kan Ban, JIT, benchmarking, quality circles, continuous improvement of process control. No slack in the system, no unaccounted inventory, full utilisation of the installed assets: nowhere to hide failures, instead analyse and fix the problem causes.

At least that's what happened in progressive businesses, most UK manufacturing didn't bother, and steadily went to the wall. It was very sad, companies with full order books for saleable product unable to see that their 'same old, same old' practises had to go right now to enable them to continue to compete in the market, within the easily foreseeable future.