CIE Ballast Plough. Can you help us do it?

The recent discussion around CIE era modellers and the plough vans on the IRM forum has been the subject of much debate here in IRM Towers. We have love for the roundel as much as anyone, but as sales and our customer survey a couple of years ago showed, the love seems to be for more modern era than CIE days.

The debate started around our announcement of our plough vans, where we did announce the CIE version initially, but changed to IR and IE. There were two reasons for this; one as outlined above, and secondly, the CIE van requires additional tooling changes, including doors and removal of the mesh grills.

However, there has been impassioned pleas for the van in CIE guise. So, we have looked at it again. We feel we can do it and add it to the order along with IR and IE vans.

But there are some issues.

Firstly, we really need your support on this. We stand to make next to nothing on the ploughs, as they were more about finishing the ballast hopper train off than a money maker, but if we receive cancellations of IR and IE in favour of the CIE vans the whole project becomes unviable. So, we would need you to buy them and show your support for CIE, but we would really need you to not cancel your existing order if you have plumped for IR and/or IE. We know it’s an inconvenience, but we’ve crunched the numbers several times and it’s the only way we can do it.

As an added incentive for the CIE plough, if sales do go well we are looking to do ballast wagons with the CIE roundel in 2019, so you can have an authentic CIE era ballast train. Perfect for your Supertrain 141, 181 or forthcoming 121.

We know it’s an unusual approach, but this is a project where we really need your support for it to work. If the desire isn’t there, then we will just do IR and IE ploughs and conclude our market research and gut feeling was correct. Here is your chance to prove that wrong and act as a catalyst for CIE models to appear in the future.

Let us know what you think below, and if the desire is there we will put them up for preorder very soon for delivery along with the IR and IE vans in late August.

Cheers!

Fran (on behalf of the IRM crew!)