Hush Hush

[Buelligan]

Has anyone on here ordered and received their Hush Hush from Hornby yet? I know Hornby have sent them out, but apparently via Hermes, so delivery could be anywhere between now and Christmas! Thankfully I ordered mine through Gaugemaster who have their stock and have today sent it out via Royal Mail, so should hopefully be with me early next week. Quite excited, while its not a pretty engine, I do like the experimental nature of it. Ordered it nearly 2 years ago now I think, supposed to be due for delivery last year. So the others that I ordered earlier this year (Stephensons rocket mail pack, due last september, and streamlined W10000 in the Silver jubilee livery, due this December, will both probably also be a year late).

[Bigmet]

I will be interested to read your opinion of it. Something of a shame that water tube boilers were never able to give of their best applied to rail traction in experiments in both North America and Europe; the well developed conventional fire tube boiler easily outperformed it: but something of it lives on in the UK thanks to Gresley and Bulleid's use of the thermic syphon, which gives the remaining Bulleid pacific boilers in service their noted steam raising capability.

It's a BR late crest W1 - that I imagine is still a long while from arriving - that's the one I want. It will be assigned its regular London-Leeds and return duty, and succeeded by the other item of ECML exotica when it is withdrawn, EE's Deltic protoype.

[vespa]

Mine arrived today via Hermes with no damage as some are reporting elsewhere. See the post on Hornby's Website under "General Discussion". Apparently there are reports of damage to some on RMWeb.
Edit. I am very pleased with it as it is very well detailed and Hornby supplied at the pre order price £179.99 delivered.

[Buelligan]

Yes I've seen posts on facebook of people having them arrive damaged, several seem to have snapped the smoke deflectors which would certainly leave me less than pleased, especially after the extended wait! Once again I forgot to phone up and cancel my preorder for the garter blue streamlined version, so at this rate I may well end up with that too which I no longer want, as I've ordered the silver jubilee livery instead.

[centenary]

Good luck with your Hermes deliveries at this time of year!

I sent a item to a fleabay buyer on 7 December and closely follow the tracking. After all the scanning and initial updates the parcel had entered the Hermes network, the tracking stopped. Regularly checking for tracking updates, after 48 hours of there being none, I tried to contact Hermes via a chat option. No joy OL, try the phone. Hung up after 30 minutes in a queue and no nearer speaking to a human.

Got onto fleabay to see if they could kick Hermes. It's now 12 December and tracking now states, Delayed, wait 48 hours for further update. Item should have been delivered Friday gone.

Have to say, this model wouldnt be on my list to buy, just looks odd to me!

[Buelligan]

Well it arrived yesterday, but having worked 12 hours the previous night, and then having to stay up to look after a poorly child who couldn't go to school, I didn't really get a chance to look it over.
So this morning after dropping the kids off at school I got home and started unwrapping it, from the 5 boxes it was in! I'm not the most qualified to comment on accuracy, but it certainly looks nicely detailed and will look goo on my layout. I've not run it on my layout, as it's currently inaccessible with the pre-Christmas build up of presents hidden away. However I have run it on the rolling road, its a very nice smooth runner, even with an old dodgy HM minor DC control, almost silent forwards, slightly noisier in reverse.

Thankfully mine arrived seemingly without damage, unlike plenty of others I've seen reported online! Only thing I think will get easily broken is the little bracket just in front of the chimney. At 18" plus distance it looks great, but sadly the finish isn't so great up close. The white lines across the boiler are ever-so-slightly out of line from side to side, admittedly can only be seen from above, and won't be noticeable while moving, but still, for the price its disappointing. As well as that, the general finish is lacking, the grey looks more like its coloured plastic mouldings, rather than painting, giving it a toylike look.

Overall, I'm happy with it, and I'll be keeping it. But I do also kind of wish I'd not pre-ordered, waited 2 years, and paid £200, and had instead waited a little longer and picked one up cheaper 2nd hand or on a clearance offer or something. Probably made worse by the extended wait for it, but have to admit I'm left a little deflated, and wondering whether to cancel my other pre-orders.

[Bufferstop]

Good luck with your Hermes deliveries at this time of year!

I do everything I can to avoid using Hermes, even to choosing a different supplier. The courier companies all seem to have their faults, but Hermes is the one which seems not to care about the items they deliver. We've had two high value items from Amazon go astray, one removed from the box by unsticking the tape on the bottom seal, the other staying in the van whilst it waited for the GPS to clock its position then driving off. A loss of about £2.000 to Amazon but no argument about refund or replacement they just redelivered and took the hit. DPD seem reasonably efficient and are the best on doing collections, even down to doing all the paperwork on site. No complaints about Royal Mail and Parcel Farce either, the staff at the local depot know the best times to find us, we've even been flagged down leaving home by a driver with a parcel for us on the van.

[Buelligan]

Good luck with your Hermes deliveries at this time of year!

I meant to reply to this in my other post. I don't think time of year affects Hermes inefficient 'delivery service' (using the term very lightly). In the summer I ordered some drop links for my car, Hermes collected them from the seller within a day, and gave me an expected delivery of a few days later. I check a couple of days later and it had no record of the tracking number. Kept trying and a few days later it gave similar message as yours. The eBay seller couldn't help as they only had the same information as me. It took me around a week to actually get through to speak to someone at Hermes, who finally told me there had been a problem with a batch of labels, and they were all having to be processed manually. In all it took nearly 5 weeks to get my parcel! And if that wasn't bad enough, when it finally arrived I found I'd only ordered one, and not the 2 as I needed, so had to order again! Luckily they sent the next via RM next day service.

[Bufferstop]

An illustration of why I have such a low opinion of Hermes. Watching from the kitchen window between the vertical blinds I watched as the Hermes driver brought his van to a stand one handed whilst holding a phone to his ear. Without releasing the phone he proceeded to pick up a box from the passenger seat, carry it half way across the frontage, then toss it against the foot of the front door, get back in the van and reverse off down the road, all one handed.
Fortunately all the box contained were A3 manilla envelopes! Not much to get broken in there.

[6C]

That loco is lovely - now need to formulate an excuse...

This time of year, definitely does affect the parcel companies - some of them are shifting 33% of their yearly parcels in December...

[D605Eagle]

Not happy with mine at all. This is the third hornby model on the trot that I've immediately passed on as its just not good enough for the money. I bought from a model shop so no my herpes issues, and no damage to the bodywork. However, the paint finish was not good There's a plethora of poorly painted molded plastic parts that should be metal, especially handrails. I thought that Hornby had realised with the design smart affair that moulding parts out of plastic was not the way forwards. Also running board at the front of the loco is so badly warped it looks awful. Add to that the motor is very out of balance to the point its like the vibrate motors in game console handsets. The cab is nicely painted but there's no firebox glow (I know its just a gimmick, but when you compare this to Dapol's Prairie with its metal parts, electro plated (or however they do it!) plastic parts, and other gizmos for almost £100 less, then this loco is quite frankly a rip off). It's only because Hornby have engineered their models into collector items by under manufacturing to demand that these things are commanding high prices.

[Metadyneman]

Lovely model of a peculiar prototype. Personally I wouldn't give it house(or layout) room. It looks like someone has draped a duvet over a loco and just let it melt round the frames with a front end designed on a fag packet. It was a failure then and seems to be something of a failure in model form given the number of broken examples arriving on peoples doormats.
You might have guessed by now I don't actually like it, but I do fully understand those who do so please don't shoot me for giving my opinion on it

[Buelligan]

Yesterday I finally got around to putting W1 on my layout and giving it a run/test. I was still feeling disappointed with it, and wasn't expecting much from the performance. However I was pleasantly surprised, it's a very smooth runner, using my old H&M Duette it pulls away lovely and slowly, even with all the coaches I had to hand (6 LNER teaks, 3 Ex LNER crimsons, and a Pullman dining car), it still pulled away slowly and smoothly, with no wheel slippage, despite there being a slight incline on the station straights. It's quite a wide loco at the front, so some things will need moving back from the track slightly to accommodate it on the curves. It's also almost silent, almost too quiet, makes my other locos sound pretty bad.

There is a downside with running though... I'm not and never will be a fan of these fixed pony trucks, they may be more detailed, but I prefer the old style where the pony truck moves with flanged wheels on the track. The specific problem with the fixed pony truck on the W1, is that the 4-6-4 wheel arraignment makes it very long, and so even on the 4th radius curves on my outer track, the overhang is still silly and the cab door moves almost 1/4 of the way across the tender. It's something I think I can live with but it may well end up spending more of it's time on the shelf than on the track, unless I can find somewhere for a much larger layout.

It does sit nicely next to my A4's on the rails, I did spend an hour out there with my camera, so some photos will follow in the next few days when I've had a chance to upload them.

[Chops]

https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/v ... tion=click

[Bigmet]

...It's a BR late crest W1 - that I imagine is still a long while from arriving - that's the one I want...

Less of a wait than I was anticipating, and I am now wondering over Hornby's packaging: outer brown cardboard box, flexible plastic sleeve, and only then the Hornby red 'shelf display' box. (The previous new Hornby loco purchased was the J36, that came in the regular red box without any of this extra gubbins around the outside.) No wonder prices are increasing...

Ran beautifully out of the box, on my old Duette (basic resistance controller DC) it will crawl at 1mph forward and reverse, and can 'go express' at 12V and the only noise is the wheels on the rails. That should translate into very good performance once decoder fitted this afternoon - circumstances permitting. There's plenty of traction for the standard 11 coach express turn it typically was on for its last four years in service (mix of Bachmann mk1 and Thompson coaches). The BR green matches the Britannia from 2006, acceptable as a representation of worn finish some time after a works repaint. Everything to like in short, from the last 'legitimate' Doncaster wide firebox traction I can have on the layout. (If the P2 in streamlined form is equal to this, I'll have one in BR green late crest to keep it company. Likewise if a P1 is ever offered...)