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

[Kamome]

1 hour ago, ranger10178 said:

My HS package was actually described as a gift...

You do have to be careful with the “gift” declaration. I think if you check the HMRC it says that gifts are eligible to import duties if they are over £30. I got stung on an E6 some years ago along with the usual ransom note.

 

Have the best birthday ever , once you have forwarded us the duty + “unexplainable admin fee”, of course,  Love Parcel Force.

[ranger10178]

1 minute ago, Kamome said:

You do have to be careful with the “gift” declaration. I think if you check the HMRC it says that gifts are eligible to import duties if they are over £30. I got stung on an E6 some years ago along with the usual ransom note.

 

Have the best birthday ever , once you have forwarded us the duty + “unexplainable admin fee”, of course,  Love Parcel Force.

Yeahh, that's right! The problem with it being declared as a gift is that you (as the importer) could be charged with fraud in theory. The seller is unlikely to get any repercussions by falsely declaring an item as a gift though. 

 

I think these days the gift value is £39 or below. Though this could help out if ordering two kits for example!

 

I hate the admin fees... Parcelfarce charge £13.50 admin fee......... Royal Mail are about £8, but it's still crazy... What I can't understand is how they were doing this when they were nationalised entities - charging you an admin for for them liaising with another state owned service... Hey ho, bureaucracy for you!

[roadstar_na6]

Courier services here charge the admin fee but you can get that back from them since you never particularly told them to pull the parcel through customs. Only German Post is allowed to collect a 6€ fee unless you registered yourself in a database of people that care about customs for their stuff on their own.

 

The duty-free value here is 22€ but they won‘t charge any amount below 5€, so anything below 25€ of value usually gets through unless it‘s pretty clearly under-declared. Parcels with a value from 25-150€ are hit with 19% tax and everything above is also combined with a customs-fee of 0-20%.

 

Regarding Gifts the customs offices get suspicious when you receive a gift from a company 😉

[railsquid]

Japan doesn't seem to bother with anything under about 20,000 yen and even then only really cares if the sender supplies a commercial invoice/declaration on the outside of the package in the kind of official looking plastic wrapping which screams "Open me! Easy excise opportunity!". Not sure of the actual rate, I've only ever been charged a couple of times, probably about 10% of the declared value, and the post office charges a whopping 250 yen admin fee, all payable on delivery :D.

[Lawrence]

The time line of my HS package so far:

1/5/2020    20:01International HubAwaiting Customs clearance

1/5/2020    19:46International HubArrived in the UK

26/4/202    04:00TOKYO INT BAGDespatched to the UK

25/4/2020 12:50 Delivery Agent 

 

The paypal conversion put the value at £53 so I'm going to be well hit with charges, but apparently the plane was in the air for 5 days and I guess social distancing and the virus is having a knock on effect at customs

[ranger10178]

2 hours ago, Lawrence said:

The time line of my HS package so far:

1/5/2020    20:01International HubAwaiting Customs clearance

1/5/2020    19:46International HubArrived in the UK

26/4/202    04:00TOKYO INT BAGDespatched to the UK

25/4/2020 12:50 Delivery Agent 

 

The paypal conversion put the value at £53 so I'm going to be well hit with charges, but apparently the plane was in the air for 5 days and I guess social distancing and the virus is having a knock on effect at customs

You've not been hit with charges yet! It'll say if they've applied customs charges!

 

£53 (if that's the item value?) isn't too bad, £10 VAT plus the RM/PF charge.

[deathletter]

On 5/2/2020 at 11:28 AM, Yavaris Forge said:

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)

My guess is at least 30 years old for both of them. You can get a good idea by the paper insert if they have one. 🙃

[Lawrence]

8 hours ago, ranger10178 said:

You've not been hit with charges yet! It'll say if they've applied customs charges!

 

£53 (if that's the item value?) isn't too bad, £10 VAT plus the RM/PF charge.

£53 worth of goods and £18 odds for EMS shipping, I wouldn't mind but it's all small items, no rolling stock.

That'll be £23.50 then as parcelfarce have put their prices up 🤬

[ranger10178]

4 minutes ago, Lawrence said:

£53 worth of goods and £18 odds for EMS shipping, I wouldn't mind but it's all small items, no rolling stock.

That'll be £23.50 then as parcelfarce have put their prices up 🤬

Yeahh... That is a bit of a killer then... It's really irritating. I've just had to pay my third Customs VAT bill this week...

 

The shipping cost is included in the VAT bill too. So all in all £71 will be taxed, making a likely total of £27.70. There is a possibility that if the box has been marked as a gift/commercial sample, one or more of your items won't be charged VAT. However that discretion is up to HMRC - if they feel the package is a gift/commercial sample or not.

 

Marking items as commercial samples opens a whole different can of worms if HMRC decide that the items aren't commercial samples. Generally it's the Chinese sellers on eBay/Aliexpress etc that may mark parcels as thus.

[Yavaris Forge]

12 hours ago, deathletter said:

You can get a good idea by the paper insert if they have one.

Well it looks pretty old judging by the papers. I'm not really good in japanese but doesn't the date on the middle one refer to Showa 60 (1985)?

[Welshbloke]

I love the train formation stickers they used to bundle with sets then. My 153 Series has them applied to its case to identify it. Incidentally, mine has a copyright date of 1979 on the sticker sheet, so I've always assumed it to date from around then. It's currently clattering around in its eight car form but runs as a ten when loop length permits.

[railsquid]

12 hours ago, Yavaris Forge said:

Well it looks pretty old judging by the papers. I'm not really good in japanese but doesn't the date on the middle one refer to Showa 60 (1985)?

 

Yup, which looks like the date of purchase, from a shop called "Poppo" in Tokyo's Adachi-ku, which incredibly still exists.

[ia909]

17 hours ago, Lawrence said:

£53 worth of goods and £18 odds for EMS shipping, I wouldn't mind but it's all small items, no rolling stock.

That'll be £23.50 then as parcelfarce have put their prices up 🤬

Can you use Hobby Link's personal warehouse or similar to store the stuff until you have a sensible amount to cover the costs?

 

Used DHL last week. Ordered from HS on Sunday, paid DHL's costs of £43 (whatever they consist of - didn't really check, just paid) on Wednesday, delivered Thursday to Wembley Park. Excellent service given the current problems. So for larger ticket orders that the way I'd go at the moment.

[Lawrence]

Update on the parcelfarce page

 

Date          Time LocationTracking    event

5/5/2020 14:24 International Hub  Customs charges raised

 

😭

[ranger10178]

48 minutes ago, Lawrence said:

Update on the parcelfarce page

 

Date          Time LocationTracking    event

5/5/2020 14:24 International Hub  Customs charges raised

 

😭

Well they're billing you. You may well see a "Customs charges revised" as well, I think that's when ParcelFarce add their bill.

[railsquid]

In future I shall start playing "Yes I did It Again" by Britney Spears every time I open up an arrival.

 

This time, a Kato Seibu 101 series (old style), more-or-less as new (barely any scratches on the cardboard outer case even), very discounted price because some bits had come loose from the power car:

 

Kato Seibu 101 series (original style) by Rail Squid, on Flickr

 

which was simply a matter of pushing the bits back into place.

 

Put the whole train on the track and tada, it lights up along its whole length.

 

Kato Seibu 101 series (original style) by Rail Squid, on Flickr

 

I double-checked the auction description, no mention of that. This is about the 5th time I've had this happen.

[deathletter]

On 5/5/2020 at 5:18 PM, Yavaris Forge said:

I'm not really good in japanese but doesn't the date on the middle one refer to Showa 60 (1985)?

I don't read Japanese either but Showa 60 would be 1985. His son served nowhere near long enough so it would have to be 1985.

 

When I was stationed in Japan in the late 1987/1988, I purchased three Steam Locomotives from a local hobby shop near the base. They had a paper insert like the one on the left in the photo below. The blue and silver label was newer and the dark green and cream labels (far right in the photo) are newer than the blue and silver. The newest labels are all dark green. If someone else has seen something newer than these then please post it here. 🙃

 

Edited May 6, 2020 by deathletter
Wrong information....

[railsquid]

The dark green (the C11 box) is the current style. IIRC the current logo with the raised "A" came in around 1987, and the style on the right was used from around then until some time in the 1990s.

[deathletter]

7 hours ago, railsquid said:

The dark green (the C11 box) is the current style. 

 

Well, that is a surprise. I have changed my post accordingly. 

[railsquid]

And the very oldest packaging (before they started using the classic plastic cases) is red and white (though very rare), see e.g. here: https://katomodels.wixsite.com/50thmm?lightbox=dataItem-ir3c7jwf

[deathletter]

1 hour ago, railsquid said:

And the very oldest packaging (before they started using the classic plastic cases) is red and white.....

I have recently seen a locomotive and passenger cars on ebay with red and white. 

[ranger10178]

16 minutes ago, deathletter said:

I have recently seen a locomotive and passenger cars on ebay with red and white. 

Kato Roundhouse? I've seen a maroon and white case with Kato Roundhouse written on it. Not sure what that brand ever was though.

[ranger10178]

A couple of parcels arrived this week from Japan. One from Hobbysearch, the other from Plaza Japan.

 

All in all a heck of a lot of small buildings! I really like the Tomytec buildings, they look better than I thought they would! The only one I'm not sure on is the cinema, but that's merely the choice of paint colour! (Well and the kit not fitting together 100%) I'd honestly have to give then an 8 out of 10! The only one I didn't finish assembling was the Koban (Police box), as I need to figure out an easy way of powering the LED. Perhaps I'll see if I can find a small switch and just do it with a AAA battery or something!

 

I've got the greenmax kits to look forward to next! These need painting of course, but that's most of the fun!

 

Also not pictured is a tiny loco chassis and a Greenmax Track Maintainance train set - which I hope to motorise and run. (However I found the loco is actually available commercially, as well as the wagons).

[deathletter]

7 hours ago, ranger10178 said:

Kato Roundhouse? I've seen a maroon and white case with Kato Roundhouse written on it. Not sure what that brand ever was though.

No... these had the labels on the end in red and white. They were individual cars and a locomotive. And the labels on the end only had Kato.

Edited May 7, 2020 by deathletter
More information....

[ranger10178]

9 minutes ago, deathletter said:

No... these had the labels on the end in red and white. They were individual cars and a locomotive. And the labels on the end only had Kato.

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/716564990690014679/

 

So not like this?