Hi George,

In the Lady's defence, you have to remember that some people in Ireland haven't seen blue sky before   

Looking at similar locos on eBay, quite a few of them have a similar piece of metal in the box.

With the A, B, C, D & E markings, I'd guess it's a gauge of some description.

Do any of the dimensions match the 16.5mm of OO Gauge track? How do they compare to the back-to-back dimensions of the wheelsets?

Hope all forumites are coping beneath the HEAT DOME. Good grief. It'll probably be cold and raining next week.

I note on the interweb which would be better if it was called News of the World web, that a geography professor, Mary Bourke, at Trinity College, Dublin, has concluded that:

"The sky is exposed to us, there are no clouds. It is a stable mass of air that is bringing warm air down to the surface and taking away moist air, so the air is not only warm, it is also dry."

Good Lord! What an amazing piece of scientific observation! I think my 7 year old granddaughter needs to apply for a job in tertiary education.

It would be laughable if it wasn't so pathetic.

Quote from: Bigmac on May 27, 2026, 10:26:01 PM

Quote from: njee20 on May 27, 2026, 10:07:53 PMThe tone of your post even makes this sound like bait. 

How many £19 drills do you think they sell globally?

How many models of whatever your preferred thing is do you think they sell?

Some reading for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale

Obviously Farish could make 1,000,000 units. They'd be cheap. The market would be totally saturated. They'd go out of business. Win.

so why do some manufacturers deliberately make short runs ?

The simple answer to that is that they don't just for the sake of doing so, it is driven by commercial considerations.

Before even starting the process of making a model they will consider the likely market size for it, and if that projected demand does not meet or exceed the minimum order quantity required by their factory then chances are it won't proceed.

If it does meet a MOQ level the next question is to determine how many models of each livery and in total should be made. The greater the number made the lower the unit cost is likely to be, but that is only beneficial if they can all be sold. As @njee20 has said, it is no use making a huge volume in order to get the unit cost down if 3/4 of them stay on the shelf tying up valuable working capital, that is a sure fire route to financial disaster.

So a manufacturer has to try and walk a tightrope between producing enough to meet the factory's MOQ and expected demand while not massively oversupplying the market, and the N market is not huge so typically the volume of any given N product made will in comparison to your cordless drill be miniscule.

Typically manufacturers do not reveal numbers, but by way of an example it is fairly well known that Graham Farish models have been made in batches of 1008 per livery variant (these days often split into two running numbers) so if there are four liveries produced that's a shade over 4,000 in total.


Roy

And while we are pondering market sizes and economics, there is the eternal question of why does a pint of beer cost twice as much in a London pub as in my local Wetherspoons in the Midlands. Should be a great opportunity for opening a pub in London @Bigmac and selling beer imported from the Midlands.

And the Pips. something definitely missing...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_95Rv68qlvU

Quote from: Bigmac on May 27, 2026, 09:44:06 PMI suppose someone will state the obvious that " they" make millions of these cheap drills so that brings the price down--to a few pennies--allowing the multitude of online del boys to make a nice living. So why cant the N gauge manufacturers learn from this?

No doubt the site headmaster will enlighten me.

You've answered your own question in the first paragraph above.

The list of classes of loco not yet produced is getting smaller along with the size of those classes. The chances of getting 'one offs' such as 'Lion', 'Kestrel' etc are virtually nil.

Any N gauge news from Rails is usually found on the forum so I'll only resubscribe maybe before this year's Advent calendar kicks in

Manufacturers don't openly publicise the size of their runs (except for limited editions), in the case of those limited editions the clue is in the name, they're limited, that keeps demand high.

Stock sitting on shelves costs money, so manufacturers don't want to end up with lots left over, and/or having to discount. That alone becomes a vicious cycle because people will just think "oh, I'm not paying full price, these will be discounted in 6 months time"; this was a common issue with Heljan models in OO.

The market being small, and fickle, makes it virtually impossible for manufacturers to second guess what will really be popular. Obviously they choose models they think will sell well, but we've seen plenty of models (Dapol 59 is the screamingly obvious example right now) where they just misjudged/mistimed the market. That's bad for everyone in the long term, and even in the short term in that instance it's only good if you want a 59 with inaccurate colours and incorrect lighting for £75, even then Rails still have 40+ of some models.

In your email app, create a rule/filter that inspects incoming email and IF TRUE that the sender address includes "@railsofsheffield.com" AND the body does NOT include "N gauge", THEN delete without reading.