Dear all

I thought you would all like to know Marklin are bringing out a Doation car for the Ukrainian war. Details will be sent to all Insiders later today. It is a coach in blue and yellow and limited to 2500 pieces.

David

How do we order it?

Got one!

My fastest transaction ever (<100 seconds)

Yes, of course I looked at theLink Alan! I tried clicking the pay options, looked for an item number, there is no instruction there. Ordering began today. They are likley gone by now.
There are other ways to donate to the Ukranian war effort anyhow.

Thank you Nigel. Some people can be rather condescending.

Yep, I agree Alan, there was no way I was going to be up at 4am refreshing a computer page in the hope of buying something..

I do enough of that for work let alone a hobby...

It was limited to only 2500 cars. I wonder how many they could have sold if they had kept the window open for a day?

well, yes, but they wouldn't get manufactured within the stated time frame.

Think about it another way, suddenly a situation arises where Marklin figure they want to do something to raise funds to help the victims of the fighting, so one way would be to just make a donation. That comes straight out of the company bottom line on the balance sheet. But for the same amount of money they can make a coach which they can sell at a price commensurate to other similar coaches they make. They donate all the income from the coach (after deducting MWsT) to the aid fund, because they are using the money they would otherwise have donated to fund the manufacture of the coach. This will result in around twice the amount of money going to the aid fund as the coach will be priced at their normal ex-factory profit price.

Now the problem becomes that there has been no production slot assigned to the manufacture of this coach they suddenly want to produce, so where to fit the manufacture of this coach into the production schedule, and the supply of materials it needs. So someone on the production side shuffles things around in whatever production scheduling software they have, and figures they can make a production window that will deliver the items in June (the stated time of delivery - and they probably wouldn't want to wait longer than that, as it is three months away). So then they look at the material supply situation and the size of the production window, and figure they can work 2500 coaches into this window, and they will have enough materials on hand for this quantity, so that becomes the size of the production lot.

Also remember that the production of these coaches is probably being tagged on the end of the production of some identically bodied, but different liveried coaches, so they don't need to specially set up the plastic molding machines and so on for the individual items needed to produce the coach. The only thing they need to change is the painting and printing on the bodies. This is what they did with the Flood Aid VT92.5 loco, they worked out how to get the materials and tag the production onto the end of the Insider VT92.5 loco.

Also just remember that because they have tagged this extra batch of coaches into the production schedule something else will be late - because of schedule time and/or lack of materials that the other item requires, because the materials destined for the other item(s) has been diverted to make this batch of coaches. This is all part of the joys of Just In Time material supply in the manufacturing world.

You make an excellent point Alan. Oh to be a fly on the wall to see just what was actually involved in bringing an item like this to market in the timeframe available.

Thanks for the viewpoint

Thanks

When order will available open again to someone in June if payment didn't go through such as credit card from UK etc.

Paypal recommend?

For those who missed out on the coach, or would like a loco to go with their coach, there is a model of a Vectron, suitably liveried, becoming available through a shop in Germany, using an LS Models Vectron as the basis. (Google translate works fine on the page)

The price is a bit steep for an AC sound version, but in line with Marklin pricing of recent offerings. Limited to 1500 items total.

Same model also available through the Bahn Shop