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Complaint to Hornby by a modeller in Rome.
quote:
Dear Hornby, I am an Italian (former) customer of Lima/Rivarossi train models, and like other people has already done I am writing to complain about the new edition of Italian models distributed by Hornby International with the Rivarossi brand. Probably you already know that these models are FULL of incomprehensible mistakes, giving the impression that who built these models had no idea about the real prototype, or any documentation has been consulted (if yes, maybe it was completely wrong...). Among Italian modelists there is a lot of disconcernment, finding any logical reason to what has been done, and most of them decided to stop buying Rivarossi models until they aren't at least acceptable. I won't describe in detail all the problems that these models have, the list would be too long...I cite the colours, most of them are considerably different from reality (in particular the light and dark brown -called castano-isabella in Italian- are too similar, the blue stripes of the xmpr livery are almost violet, and the light grey of E444 and E656 seems to be turning to green), in particular on the E402A, E444 and Z coaches many details seems unfinished, and lots of small details are missing (we can imagine that the cause of this is the hurry to deliver in shops the model within last Christmas...), the E656 had wrong buffers, many service writings on the models are wrong, incoherent with the version or even with orthographical mistakes (!), the colour scheme of some models (UIC-X coaches and E444R in xmpr livery) is not correct, and so on…last Saturday arrived in shops the new edition of the D341 diesel locomotives, and these models unbelievably have the front lights too big, their size is almost triple comparing to reality! We can’t understand the reason of this, as on the old Lima model the lights were much smaller and much more realistic. Resuming the situation we can say that all the improvements promised for these models hasn’t been realized, otherwise the reality is the opposite, that is to say that from the aesthetical point of view these new models are a disaster, a big regression comparing to the old Lima/Rivarossi models. What looks very strange is that the new German, French and Spanish models delivered recently by Hornby International are NOT affected by these problems, only Italian models are full of mistakes. The consequent question is: why? It is logical to think that only the Italian division of Hornby International did a very bad job as the other European models are good, maybe giving wrong directions or without applying a good quality test, we can only make suppositions, but the result is what I described before. During the Hobby Model Expo in Novegro (Milan) some people tried to speak with the responsibles in the Hornby Italia stand, to underline all these problems, and the answer has been that the models respects the standard quality of the production and won’t be modified. If this is really the quality they wanted to reach, I am very worried also for the future models, in particular for the steam locomotive Gr. 740…
So I am writing directly to Hornby UK hoping that my letter (and the ones of other sad Italian customers) will push you to control with attention the work made by Italian division of Hornby International, asking suggestions about the production to people that has a REAL competence in the train model sector, finding new collaborators and so on. We know that is difficult to restart a production in such a small time, but in this particular industrial sector without competence and passion it is impossible to have good results, and these new models are the evidence of what I am saying. I hope that this complaint will be useful. Thank you for your attention.
unquote.
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