Issue 154: Hands On With The New Omega Railmaster
Why does no-one want to make a good scientists' watch any more?
Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that has a new podcast episode for you! Live this morning, Episode Three of The Watch Enquiry asks “Has Collaboration Killed Creativity?” It’s our first episode tackling an issue of present-day watchmaking and I want to say one thing loud and clear: with a headline like that you have to listen to it before you jump to conclusions.
Our point is not that all collab watches, or the people who specialise in making them, lack creativity. Quite the opposite. Some of my favourite people in this industry are super-collaborators and they have injected life into mainstream watchmaking. That is our point: without them, we worry that (some) watch brands would struggle to have any brilliant ideas of their own.
We have a deep conversation about what it means to collaborate on a watch design, what happens when established brands try to bring out brand new ideas, why the industry has such a hard time giving credit to designers and nurturing creativity and what might make that change in the future. Truly, I can’t wait to hear what you think of this one.
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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:
Going Off The Rails
What the Railmaster is reduced to, and what it really should be
Omega introduced the Railmaster at the same time as the Speedmaster and Seamaster 300, in 1957, but that is about all it has in common with those legendary names. I can’t quite say it’s the Paul Gallagher of Omega tool watches, but it’s pretty close. It lived - as far as I can ascertain - for just six years before being dropped, and then spent 40 years in the wilderness before emerging again and again in the 21st century as a heritage re-issue model. The closest it has come to a proper return was in 2018, when Omega brought out a version with a denim-style blue brushed dial, a denim strap, no sign of fauxtina, and pencil hands. That lasted until last year1, when it was discontinued. Maybe six years is the maximum lifespan for Railmasters.
Some media - and I think Omega itself - have tried to use the rarity of original models as a foundation on which to build a modern-day reputation for the Railmaster as a cult classic2 or even a long-lost icon, but it’s more accurate - if less romantic - to say that the Railmaster has just never really been that popular. Of course, the CK2914 is hard to find and that might well mean that if you love it, you’ll probably have to pay over the odds for a good one - and the Peruvian or Pakistani Air Force versions command a premium as they should - but the fact that the Railmaster story rather ran out of track does mean that the vintage market is pretty limited.
Anyway, I digress: yesterday, May 15th, Omega launched two new Railmaster references, and ahead of the release sent me one for 24 hours to take a look. I wasn’t planning on writing another Omega review so soon after the FOIS Speedmaster from last year, but sometimes opportunity trumps motive, as it were.
Any fans of the band Sparks in the house? A lyric springs to mind:
“In every other way I find you amazing but one; I wish you were fun”
— I Wish You Were Fun, 2017
I’ve been waiting to use that about a watch for a long time, and this feels like the perfect opportunity. This Railmaster is comfortable, well-sized, solidly-built, not overly thick, competitively-specced and in today’s world, not even exorbitantly expensive. But oh my dear goodness it is not interesting. The moodboard for the grey version seems to have been “Pathé newsreel meets accounting convention.”3 There is a brown dial version with a small-seconds subdial which if I am being generous, might be slightly more visually compelling, especially if you went out and found a more energetic strap. But would you?
Look: monochrome designs are ok by me. Omega does a great Aqua Terra in black. But this Railmaster doesn’t know what it’s meant to be, because I don’t think Omega knows what to do with the name - other than run out this same type of watch over and over again - and that means the design… well let’s just say it suffers. Form is going to have a hard time following function if your function isn’t defined4.
There are two big problems for me (and then we can get to some of the positives!). First is the notion that in 2025 a gradient, or fumé, dial is an acceptable substitute for a personality. It’s not. The great fumé craze began around the same time the Railmaster celebrated its 60th anniversary, in 2017, and we were still all-in on faux lume. Now practically everyone has had a go - in fact it’s been so ‘done’ that this week Christopher Ward was able to make a virtue out of not giving its The Twelve a gradient dial - and you need to bring more to the table if you want people to be impressed by your dial work. There are still outstanding fumé dials out there but they’re created by craftspeople and when you have one up close, they sing. This dial barely mumbles.
Secondly, the Railmaster DNA is not what you’d call ‘great source material’. Because the Railmaster never enjoyed a long and happy life in the golden age of tool watches, and because as a brand it can be rather literal in its reinterpretations of its own archive, Omega is limited to the look of the 1957 original, reference CK2914, and that was a flat, almost featureless thing. (Again; minimalism can be a wonderful virtue, and good tool watches are rarely overcomplicated, but it’s not working here.) The flat, printed dial and tall rehaut are just so… unimposing. The typography is much nicer now it’s back to echoing the original, rather than the thinner, taller, more modern type of the 2018 reference, I’ll say that.
What do I like about the watch, then?
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