Phoenix locos are UK based international distributors of high quality, affordable battery electric model locos,
rolling stock and loco bogies in 5 inch and 7.25 inch gauge that are ideal as club locos or in garden railways.

Spot the difference?

Looking around you may have noticed that there have been more than a few changes to our site. We'd like to take this opportunity to welcome you, we hope you like it. We would like to further extend a welcome Model Engineer readers, who may have noticed the ad we ran in this months issue. The ad was sent to print about two weeks ago, and we made a pretty bold promise. A brand new web site with lots of new content and as many new features as we could fit under the hood. We like a challenege, so decided that with out an awful lot on paper as a starting point to set ourselves a deadline of 17th of June, or the publication date of the magazine to have a completely re-worked bespoke web site, completed and uploaded online. Not an easy task, and a couple of late nights later, here we are... Proud to say we finished on deadline.

We'd like to talk you through some of the changes, but first an important bit of information, we will be attending the Kit Builders Rally this Saturday 19th June.

The rally is hosted by The Nottingham Society of Model and Experimental Engineers at their wonderful site at Ruddington (Sat Nav Ref: NG11 6NX). We will be taking our 7¼ gauge Class 42 Loco and as much rolling stock as we can fit in the van!

Polly Models will be there and the Great Central Railway Centre is next door.

We've been working hard with the site, and many things have changed. The biggest thing is the width. We've stretched the content sideways, so we have more space, and can present a third column. It allows us to have more content with less clutter, and sometimes provide you with an interesting bit of meta data, or such as in the Phoenix section, persistently show our contact details so they're easily visible.

Whilst we're talking about the Phoenix section, you may notice that the "Why not check out..." image will change every time you load the page. There are about 15 in total, so it may take you a little while to see them all.

The products section is the area where we've made the most exciting changes. As you can see we've added a lot of new information on our Rolling Stock range, a few of which you may not have seen or known about before, so please have a browse around. Each product is selectable from the menu on the left, and then "Information", "Specification", "Frequently Asked Questions" and "Photos" can be selected from the menu on the right. We have also included the price of the product you're viewing on every page, so you can see at a glace how much each product costs whilst you're reading about it

We have also compiled a Photo Gallery. We've put together a collection of (at the time of writing) 237 photos, and counting. When we get more, we'll be sure to put them online as soon as we can. The Gallery uses lightbox (a wonderful and powerful piece of software), and each of the albums can be navigated in a number of ways. Once viewing an image in the album you can press the P and N keys on your keyboard to cycle through the images. You can also use the left and right arrows to the same effect. Alternately if you click on the left half of the image, you can go backwards, and if you click on the right half of the image, you can go forward through the album. We hope that makes sense. There are numerous ways to navigate around the album, so choose the one that suits you best.

As you can see from the top menu, we've also added a "Second Hand List". From time to time we come across things like Used Rail, or an ex-development loco, and we intend to use this section of our web site to let you know about the one off items we currently have. You could grab yourself a bargain, so why not see whats available?

We've also added a news section. We're going to do our best to keep you updated with goings on. Even if they're small updates on the go, or slightly more considered, we understand how important feedback and news is to our customers' hopefully we'll be able to share what we're up to with you as much and as often as we can.

Thats about all for now, please explore the rest of the site, there might be the odd thing we haven't mentioned here (why spoil all the surprises?). We hope you like the work we've put in, and that it results in a better and easier browsing experience for you. We welcome any feedback. Our web site should work for you, just as much as it works for us. So, if we haven't lived up to your expectations, let us know how we can do better. Our contact details can be found here.