Dear All,
It’s time for another newsletter from the Box Boys. It only seems like yesterday since we wrote the last one and a lot of water has passed under our bridge here at Trainsporters since then.
In September we celebrate the first anniversary of the website going live and the launch of our business, an interesting experience in the thick of COVID-19! Before then we had sold a small number of boxes to our fellow club members at the Hillingdon Railway Modellers Club and some to the Guildford O Gauge and Twickenham clubs all were known to us and supported us tremendously.
We had tested the water in early 2020 when we attended the Kettering show, little were we to know that would be the first and last exhibition of that and this year so far! However, as we write this note we are excited to see the green shoots of normality returning. Disappointedly our first outing, which was to have been Guildex in Stafford this September, has been cancelled, but we are still hopeful of our other bookings at Folkestone, Tolworth, still going ahead, we will also be attending the Guildford O gauge open day, The Great Electric Train Show, and the Reading Trade show, we are very keen to start meeting you all in person.
For those of you that have ordered from us in the past ten months, we are very grateful for the perfect start you have given the company and for the very positive reviews you have left for us. Where possible we try to improve our products and services as much as possible and your feedback has been invaluable. We also have a number of other new product options in the melting pot, more on that later.
We did experience an interesting phenomenon around Christmas time when we had an increasing number of broken corners and handles on the boxes we were sending out.
With the benefit of hindsight we believe this was solely due to the increased volume of parcels and the sheer weight that imposed on some of the freight transport used at that time of year, especially as more and more people seem to be buying online nowadays. However, for safe measure, we added extra packing in the box to support specific areas of the cardboard shipping box and that has rectified the issue.
We also took the bold step of standardising our box pricing and offering free shipping, that has certainly made ordering simpler and has increased interest in our product. We have also had to stay true to our customers and keep the price at a reasonable rate, despite suffering from increased costs from the foam manufacturers and we are sure you will have heard of the supply chain issues with cardboard at the moment. We have not increased our prices and hope that things will return to their original raw material costs at some point next year.
We have reviewed the option of supplying just the foam inserts but unfortunately we cannot get to an attractive price point especially when we add in the shipping costs, however we will be bringing inserts with us to the shows where it will be of much more cost effective for people to purchase. We are about to post the paper insert templates online for those that would wish to print more off for themselves.
We will also be bringing some electronic “solder your own” kit samples to the shows to gauge the interest in those items. The first kits will be a couple of hand controllers, a simple DC controller and a version of the much loved Kent Panel Control pulsed controller. Both will give fine control of DC layouts and come complete with everything one would need to build your own high quality hand controller. We will also be bringing out some Transformer boxes and Capacitor Discharge Units, all in the “solder your own” range. We will also have a trainsistors website for you to order from.
Finally, we are still hopeful of being able to supply some train formations in our boxes and at the moment are considering some presflo options using some of the fine rolling stock from Ellis Trains and some Dapol Pannier or Class 08 locomotive power, please feel free to give us your thoughts on the above. Again we will launch these on our website soon.
Stay well, stay safe and very best regards,
“The Box Boys”,
Mark, Carl and Tony
info@trainsporters.com
www.trainsporters.com
0333 4040 811