What did you order or the post deliver? (Japanese N Gauge)

[ranger10178]

Postie brought me this today! It's a shame I didn't win the bidding at £40, but still considering it's effectively brand new, £120 is okay (as that's what the person paid in Japan - they left the receipt in the case)

[roadstar_na6]

Finally everything I ordered in the last few months arrived (apart from one parcel from HLJ) 🙂

 

Next up is a parcel from Mandarake that‘s already in transit and a container train with loco that‘s at ZenMarket‘s warehouse. I can‘t wait to get my hands on them 🙂

Edited April 28, 2020 by roadstar_na6

[Sheffie]

Without warning (and I was tracking it) my order of containers and Koki wagons and fancy catenary poles arrived. 

[ranger10178]

14 minutes ago, Sheffie said:

Without warning (and I was tracking it) my order of containers and Koki wagons and fancy catenary poles arrived. 

Looking good! The more Koki's the better! Something that annoys me very slightly with the Tomix 12ft container sets is that they only have three containers, despite the fact you'd probably want 5 per wagon! I'll have to think about getting some of the 30ft containers, as I believe these are quite common in Japan. They were pretty much phased out in the UK by the 1990's I think!

 

My package arrived without any shipping updates on the tracking today, however it was only posted yesterday, and arrived from around 30 miles away, so they probably didn't have time to update the system properly. 9I suspect there's a lag of a few hours for these things. (Especially with a higher volume of mail than Christmas at the moment!)

 

I'm on 10 Koki's now! (Still gotta get a few more containers to buy to put on them though)

Edited April 28, 2020 by ranger10178

[cteno4]

Actually that Kato 5 pack is about the only set of 12’ that has 5. Tomix and Hogarakadou (who make most of the containers out there) do 12’ in sets of 3 I think to keep the price reasonable as special ones that cost more they do in sets of 2. A lot of the non jrf containers you will see mixed up on kokis so you don’t have to have a full car of just one kind of container (even jrf ones). Also kokis will fun not full so you will see 1, 2, 3, and and even 4 12’ on a koki. Nother reason it’s fun modeling japan! I think we have a topic on odd koki loading, there are some interesting mixtures. Much more entertaining than our intermodal here.
 

Also you always need some extras for your container yard and trucks!

 

cheers

 

jeff

[gavino200]

1 hour ago, Sheffie said:

Without warning (and I was tracking it) my order of containers and Koki wagons and fancy catenary poles arrived. 

 

I love those surprises. That's why I never look at the tracking. I just order and forget about it. The surprise on the doorstep always makes my day.

 

[Sheffie]

One of the reasons why I bought the red stripe containers was watching videos of the prototypes. They seemed very common. But I noticed that one train could  feature every number of 12’ containers from zero to five, so I feel okay with any number. 

I haven’t seen mixtures of 12’ 20’ and 31’ in one train. I’m hoping that’s okay. 

Oh and I’m now up to 19 Koki wagons in total. I’ve got room for two or three more 🙂

[Kamome]

1 hour ago, Sheffie said:

One of the reasons why I bought the red stripe containers was watching videos of the prototypes. They seemed very common. But I noticed that one train could  feature every number of 12’ containers from zero to five, so I feel okay with any number. 

I haven’t seen mixtures of 12’ 20’ and 31’ in one train. I’m hoping that’s okay. 

Oh and I’m now up to 19 Koki wagons in total. I’ve got room for two or three more 🙂

The JRF trains in northern Kyushu are pretty mixed. There are a couple of longer trains a day with only large 31’ type containers from the big courier companies like Sagawa, Yamato and Seino, usually pulled by an EH500. The others are slightly shorter and usually have the larger 31’ containers on the Fukuoka end and the smaller 12’ boxes on the Shimonoseki end. The odd one or two Kokis have mixed sizes loaded such as ISO tanks.

[chadbag]

I took some pics from the moving train on Hokkaido as we went by some KoKis.  Totally mixed..  12' 20' 30' of all sorts all on the same train.

 

I aso have a bunch of shots of freight yards in the Osaka and Kyoto area as we went by on passenger trains but would have to go study them to see the mix is etc.

[Das Steinkopf]

14 hours ago, Sheffie said:

One of the reasons why I bought the red stripe containers was watching videos of the prototypes. They seemed very common. But I noticed that one train could  feature every number of 12’ containers from zero to five, so I feel okay with any number. 

I haven’t seen mixtures of 12’ 20’ and 31’ in one train. I’m hoping that’s okay. 

Oh and I’m now up to 19 Koki wagons in total. I’ve got room for two or three more 🙂

 

Most trains have a mix of containers and it is generally only specialist express freight trains such as the Toyota Longpass that will have purely 31' containers owned by that company on the whole train, the Seino Kangaroo Liner which is another famous freight train has about 2/3rds of the wagons occupied by Seino owned U54-38000 containers, the rest of the train will have a mix of 12' and 20' containers. With the UR19A's used by JOT they come in a number of liveries with Dark Blue, Light Blue and Pink being used for the lining as well, if you are after the ones with the Sakura print to celebrate the 2019 Rugby World Cup I highly recommend the Hogaraka Duo ones, they may be a lot more expensive than the Kato ones but the print detail and quality is superb.

Edited April 29, 2020 by Das Steinkopf

[cteno4]

The Hogaraka can get pricy, but there are so many cool ones you will find yourself releasing your wallet to them. As Das notes they have superb printing on them and you can make very fun consists and storage stacks! Even a small constrainer yard can eat up a lot of containers! You can cheat and print some out to try to fake it. Works well up to a foot or two away! We use to cheat like this on the last club layout that had a large container yard and takes forever to try to stack them and one good bump or breeze gives you an earthquake jumble! Museum gel works to hold stacks together w.o glue. I’ve not tested it (need to set that up) to see if really long periods will stain paint at all.
 

jeff

[gavino200]

58 minutes ago, cteno4 said:

Museum gel works to hold stacks together w.o glue.

 

What's museum gel?

[cteno4]

1 hour ago, gavino200 said:

 

What's museum gel?

pits basically a more stable form of blue tack. It’s made to not leach into stuff with time. Blue tack can leave a residue behind that can change color interacting with paints and such. We’ve used blue tack for holding containers stacks together for the weekend and not hav any noticeable residue (although I’ve not looked uber close at containers much later). The museum gel was a bit easier to smear a little blob into diagonal corners that the blue tack is. I had though of trying to cut some little rectangles of styrene or chipboard that is the exact dimensions of the interior openings of containers and then jut attach that with a small dab of museum gel to the top of a container to then just set a container on top. Figure I could ,peaked a little jig to center the rectangle in the perfect center of the top of the containers. Could be really fast putting them on.

 

jeff

[JR 500系]

And collected my DHL parcel from a central location to minimise contact ~ 

 

Nothing much, just some buses on pre-order, and the really cute Odakyu 8000 series 90th Anniversary Enoshima line set from GreenMax… The graphics are really cute and guess since I didn't have a real working 8000 series (Tomytec collection doesn't really count as a real working one) So I went ahead with this one! 

[bill937ca]

The DHL depot called me today and told me my package was at the depot. So I have my Tobu 50070 series train. The box looked a little rough, but the train seems to be OK. What a week!

[railsquid]

On 4/28/2020 at 9:11 PM, railsquid said:

A Tomix ED61, four miscellaneous brown Kato coaches, enough Tomix point switches to keep me going for a while, and a large number of empty Kato boxes, which I intend to use to "downsize" locomotives which come in bulkier boxes (such as the Tomix EF61 pictured here) for more efficient use of dwindling storage space (yes it is getting that bad...)

 

 

One of the miscellaneous coaches (not visible above) turned out to be this:

 

Kato OHa 31 (OHa 31-26) by Rail Squid, on Flickr

 

which is a Kato special representing the OHa 31 in the Omiya museum.

[bill937ca]

The second train this week from DHL.  A Kintetsu Series 21000 Urban Liner Plus a mainstay on Kintetsu Osaka Namba-Nagoya main line. Alas, due to an inventory hiccup in the Plaza Japan move from eBay to their own website, my two Greenmax kits were out of stock,  weren't shipped and seem to be gone for now.....

Edited May 1, 2020 by bill937ca

[Yavaris Forge]

Today two Buyee packages arrived, one from YAH and one from Mercari. I did a session of bidding and was able two acquire both a D51 and a ED75 and some cars.

I recieved:

D51 (Kato 206, can anyone tell me how old this one is?)

ED75 (Kato 309, again I think this one is quite old but runs smoothly)

Suha43 (Kato 5018-2) x2

Ohani 3055 (Kato 501)

Wamu 90000 (Tomix 2728)

Toki 25000 (Tomix 2732)

Taki 25000 (Tomix 2744)

Tamu 6000 (Tomix 2707)

 

The D51 had a loose cable connecting the tender and the motor so i had to solder it back on.

Also there was a screw missing on the underside so I had to order a replacement from the Kato/Hobbytrain german Br57 but I think they use the same screws. When I finally could do a testrun on my layout I noticed that the leading wheel does not like my Arnold switches at all so there are still some adjustments to do.

[ranger10178]

Over the last few days, the postie has brought me 3 x EF63's, 2xEF64's and an EF210 (Static cheap model) as well as three sets of 12ft containers!

 

Two of the EF63's are motorised, one isn't as it's part of the Tomix Usai Pass set! Before anyone asks, no I'm not modelling Usai Pass 😛

Edited May 2, 2020 by ranger10178

[roadstar_na6]

Some beer car collector from Germany had his MicroAce A6852 Sapporo Beer Hopper 2-set for sale on eBay for a month now and now I‘ve bitten the bullet and bought it for 45€ including shipping. It should be with me in the next days.

 

Problem now: I need to find another two packs of them to make a proper train 😄 so if anyone can lead me to some (not to overpriced ones on amazon.jp) I‘d be very grateful 🙂

[Jimbo]

well my Sankei order was returned to shipper,,,, got a refund from them which was nice,,,,, guess ill have to wait till this virus crap is all over,,

[roadstar_na6]

Ordered something at HobbySearch today, let‘s see how long it‘ll take 😄

 

I also bought some more stuff on YAJ, amongst that is my first steam engine and I‘m really excited for it 🙂

[ranger10178]

52 minutes ago, roadstar_na6 said:

Ordered something at HobbySearch today, let‘s see how long it‘ll take 😄

 

I also bought some more stuff on YAJ, amongst that is my first steam engine and I‘m really excited for it 🙂

I had a HS package arrive today (to the UK), it took around 2 weeks with EMS shipping. That included about 4 days in Customs, where HMRC decided that they wanted to strip me of my hard earned cash...

[Yavaris Forge]

Only 4 days in customs is quite fast though. I usually have to wait about 1-2 weeks for my packages to be checked. Although I did manage to evade customs last time by having my package declared as a gift.

[ranger10178]

1 hour ago, Yavaris Forge said:

Only 4 days in customs is quite fast though. I usually have to wait about 1-2 weeks for my packages to be checked. Although I did manage to evade customs last time by having my package declared as a gift.

My HS package was actually described as a gift... Perhaps they're getting ideas from Chinese companies haha! You could probably get away with calling it a gift if it was just one or two items in the box, but a large box with ten kits inside kinda does take the pee! 

 

I find customs are usually really quick - 1 day or so! Though that's with Chinese stuff - generally cosplays and the like! Those come by Royal Mail too, whereas the HS  package was Parcelfarce.