Graham Farish

Graham Farish produces large quantities of British outline model railway equipment in N gauge.

History

The Poole, Dorset based manufacturer of radio parts and kits entered the model railway business in the late 1940s, after the need for radio sets reduced post World War II. The early 1950s models focussed on British OO gauge, and they manufactured track, wagons and other supporting items. Many of the more obscure items such as the Graham Farish Coronation figures (by Russell Gammage) from 1953 are considered collectors items.

Originally the OO railway locomotives were powered by an unconventional 2 pole DC electric motor. Unfortunately many of their diecast items were manufactured with impure mazac (an alloy of zinc and aluminium), which later crumbled.

Graham Farish really found its market niche with the arrival of N scale becoming under the Grafar brand the major supplier of British outline N scale models at a time when the market was shrinking and the other OO gauge players were suffering badly. The range included 4 wheel coaches, bogied suburban stock and corridor bogied stock: all of which is generic, but is accepted by most people. Peco produced better detailed models, but produced no locomotives (except the Jubilee), focusing on wagons and its own dominance of finescale track, which Grafar had withdrawn from.

After the withdrawal of two competitive mass-market manufacturers, the Italian based Lima and German based Minitrix, for some years from the late-1980s Grafar was the only major supplier of British outline models in N scale - predicating its withdrawal from the OO scale market in light of greater competition in the developing collector scale market. Grafar produced reasonable models and had many fans, but their products were notoriously unreliable and regularly suffered splits in plastic gears, making the models run badly or in only one direction.

Takeover by Bachmann

In 2001, Graham Farish was purchased by Kader Industries of Hong Kong, and absorbed by its subsidiary Bachmann Industries. Bachmann immediately closed the Poole facility and moved production to China, setting about improving the at times poor model robustness of the products by redesigning and latterly reintroducing the entire range.

Bachmann have since increase the size of the Farish range, by duplicating models introduced to the Bachmann OO range: the detail investigation and pre-production of an original railway vehicle is more detailed for an OO scale model, while for production into Nscale there is a simply a down-scaling of most components for production. Hence normally, an OO scale Bachmann Branchline model is followed around 6/9months later by an Nscale Graham Farish model - with the new 9F steam locomotive and Voyager diesel set being two examples.

Graham Farish products are generally divided into two categories. British made equipment is sought more by collectors because it is 'older' and 'British' while model railway users generally prefer the more robust and detailed Chinese-built models. The way to tell these two types apart is that UK built models have a yellow sticker on the ends of the box and models built in China have a white sticker on the end.

External links

* [http://www.grafar.co.uk/ Graham Farish website]
* [http://ngaugesociety.com/modelling/hints/splitgears.htm Split Gears on Graham Farish Locomotives]