Trouble at t' mill

[yelrow]

tis all this cross breeding, shops wanting to cross into trying their hand at commissioning locos, without taking on full guise of manufacturing. Twas ever thus, grass always greener. Tother bachmann dealers will be estatic.

[RFS]

Seems Hatton's are not only producing the class 66, but also acting as wholesale suppliers of this model to other retailers which seems to be the sticking point. Not the same, I suspect, as Rails or Hatton's commissioning a one-off model which they then retail exclusively.

My Bachmann pre-orders at Hatton's have been cancelled but I've not had any emails to this effect. The orders have now been re-instated - at Rails.

[RSR Engineer]

It's difficult to sympathise with Hatton over this, as much as I've enjoyed their reliable and courteous service. They must have realised there could be trouble. What worries me most is a loss of competition in the market for Bachmann products. That can't be good for us modellers, expecially as Hatton often had the best prices, even if only by a small margin. And since Bachmann are one of the "big two", if I can call them that, it would be very dangerous for Hatton's long-term existence to lose such a large part of their range. Let's hope the two firms can patch up their differences.

Some years ago there was a similar situation with Brawa. I was buying from a mail-oder retailer in Karlsruhe at that time. Suddenly Brawa said they would no longer supply the Karlsruhe firm, but would ship only to bona-fide shops (I assume that means bricks-and-mortar). Of course, Brawa is nowhere near as significant a portion of a German retailer's range as Bachmann is of a British one's, and Brawa is quite up-market anyway, but the parallel is interesting. The Karslruhe retailer closed down some years later when the proprietor retired, not because of losing Brawa.

Cheers,
Artur

[LC&DR]

Maybe Hattons, Rails etc. were a bit naïve, commissioning and selling new items under their own brand name. A craftier method might indeed to have set up a subsidiary company under a completely different brand name? Or am I being devious?

[LC&DR]

The whole matter is made worse by the persistent attempts by the manufacturers, and the commissioning retailers producing duplicate models of the same prototypes instead of trying to fill in the gaps that exist in the available types.

The Terrier and the class 66 are blatant examples of this, but Hornby, Heljan and Bachmann have been guilty of this for years, and although he is no longer a player DJM as well!

[IanS]

Unfortunately if they collaborate and agree on which models to produce then the competition police would probably become involved.

[LC&DR]

I don't necessarily mean a formal agreement, just a bit of applied common-sense.

Inevitably there will be duplication, especially if two manufacturers are developing models in secret simultaneously, but it seems to me that there has been a fair bit of bloody-mindedness each trying simply to out-do the other.

It isn't as though there haven't been obvious unfilled gaps where similar, but not identical prototypes could have been done without stepping on the toes of the other. And there are whole sections of the country where the railway companies have virtually been ignored. A case in point is the North Eastern Railway where apart from the J72 and just lately the Q6 there were no models that represent the fleet of one of the largest pre-Grouping companies, and which had locomotives which had remarkably long lives. Similarly the Scottish companies, and up to a point the London and North Western Railway, although this is a less convincing argument because the LMSR cleared out many of the old LNWR classes prematurely.

[cheshire lines]

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand people like Hattons have others have provided models of items which perhaps don't have the breadth of appeal to be economic for the traditional manufacturers (eg. the ICI hopper wagons, which I purchased from them), but perhaps they were always going to run into problems expanding into more mainstream locos etc.

Having said that, what gives the traditional manufacturers to try to exclude new entrants; particularly so when most of the models are outsourced to factories in China etc. anyway.