So I’m planning a much more in depth video sometime later this year where I am going to do a more detailed analysis of these coaches, but here I’m mainly going to talk about how Bachmann have failed to do a good job of making sure that they’re customers are able to buy the models that they want and need for a realistic passenger train at a convenient time and how this will inevitably lead to a pretty nice period of heavy discounting not that far off into the future.
Now You’re probably wondering what exactly I’ talking about, well it’s about Bachmann’s new for 2025 LNWR 50′ arc roof corridor coaches.
At the time of the initial reveal we had no Idea about the prices of these coaches all we knew were the 4 Diagrams:
-Dia. 377 (Full brake) (scale 6 Inches wider than the rest)
-Dia. 316 (Center brake composite 3rd/2nd later 3rd)
-Dia. 268 (Corridor third) (With two different numbers)
-Dia. 138 (Tri-composite corridor later composite 1st/3rd) (Dual brakes fitted)
On the whole a decent if not lacking list of diagrams especially in first class while overflowing with third class.
There were also 3 liveries announced for this first batch:
-LNWR Dark claret and white
-LMS plain maroon
-M&GN plain brown (No full brake)
Which in the announcement video looked truly amazing, especially the LNWR livery ones, but when the Bachmann spring announcements came we finally learned the prices…. For a bit of context in 2017 Bachmann released their SE&CR Birdcage trio C sets and each coach had an RRP of 89.95£ and they didn’t really sell and in a couple of years they had their priced cut in half to about 45£ which is what I paid and I felt as if I had gotten a fair deal.
Now as for the price of these much shorter coaches, well it’s a bit more complex. The plain brown and maroon cost an absolutely insane 99.95£ while the LNWR variants cost an additional 10£ for a grand total of 109.95£ PER COACH! sure at the retailers they are about 10-15% cheaper but that’s still a lot of money. And I’m definingly going to be covering more about the details in the full video.
A couple months pass and the first batch arrives, featuring 6 coaches from the M&GN set and LMS set. This is already very weird as the M&GN set was made up of 4 coaches while the LMS was made up of 5, but so be it logically the best way to split these sets up would be by not including the Full brake and the alt. numbers for the thirds, but no. in their infinite wisdom both brake thirds and the LMS composite weren’t present, so the thirds, at least the M&GN ones, were totally useless because of the lack of a brake and no first class for the LMS. What’s also important to keep in mind is that most retailers only hold pre-orders for up to 28 days and as most customers who had pre-ordered the LMS or the M&GN set had also ordered he missing coaches retailers and customers waited to see if any of the other coaches were going to arrive any time soon and after a month another batch had finally arrived, this one with ⅘ LNWR coaches, only lacking the alt. number third, still not ideal but much more logical and at the end of July/beginning of august finally the remaining coaches had come into stock!
So quite the messy release but once all the coaches had finally come into stock there was another problem, mainly the terrible distribution… I’m mainly going to talk about the LNWR set as that one was the one that I was following, but here is the breakdown:
Smaller shops tend to lack any and all brakes an have third class coaches in very small supply, and as for the larger retailers, well TMC has a plentiful supply of the thirds and full brakes and Rails of Sheffield has an obscene amount of the alt. third full brakes and tri-composites in plentiful supply. Now you may have noticed something, that the Brake composite is nowhere to be seen, and well yeah that’s the main problem, as if you don’t already have one then apart from the full brake, that can be used on parcels trains the other coaches are completely useless! (Unless you happen to have any kit built LNWR corridor brake vans) because you can not form a decent passenger train with just full brakes at both ends. My best guess as to why Bachmann decided to do this is to avoid having a lot of unsold stock of brake coaches, but it has now backfired on them immensely. I’m so lucky that I was able to pick up one of these just before they sold out, as otherwise now I’d be stuck with 2 very pretty and awfully priced coaches instead of a completed train for my precedent!
Here a re some photos:
