I am only speaking from personal experience and anecdotes I heard in the 80's and 90's and know nothing about Hornby's more recent products but I know that many serious railway modellers shunned Hornby products because they simply were not good enough. Hornby never seemed to shake off its image as being a toy for children and did not strive to equal the quality of foreign manufacturers. In particular, their buildings and lineside accessories often did not look realistic and the locomotives did not respond well to controls. Several serious modellers opted for American, European and later Japanese prototypes because the quality of models available was so much better. Having said this, I still have a great deal of affection for Hornby. I once collected Hornby Dublo three rail items and one day may do so again.

Hornby catalogues of the early 70's had those beautiful Terence Cuneo paintings on the covers.

Every now and then You Tube surprises us with something you'd actually like to watch. I'm very pleased to have been directed to you! I've devoured ½doz videos already and back to back too, I'm enjoying them so much, thank you. I'm hoping that given the direction of travel of all these toy stories, can we hope for one on Meccano please?

Those old ads with Bernard Cribbins were great for their time.

Brilliant video. It's great you have done this during their 100 year celebrations. I have brought a few models off them and waiting for the new Stephensons Rocket model to arrive which is one of the limited edition anniversary trains coming out.

To forward to 2023 the financial situation of the company is now way worse. It's now 16GBX, the lowest it's ever been and the price keeps going down. A long way down from the 290GBX of 2007. Where I live it seems the distribution systems have failed and when new stock comes in the resellers are forced to set higher prices. Quality control is also lacking, trains being unboxed with build errors. Just sad to see it all imploding.

What a fantastic channel, thank you.

Hornby's Zero One was the world's first commercially mass produced DCC system in 1979. I've been running it since then and it works fine. I repair units and even repair modules as the Mk.I single BD139 transistor early modules had a habit of burning out the DC isolation capacitor next to the black wire terminal when confronted with a Wrenn, Hornby Dublo or Triang power bogie's start off current demands. It is easily replaced by a 100 pF. capacitor and works fine afterwards. Master unit keyboard membranes have the silver contact paint wear off over time. Gluing on tin foil to the membrane pads fixes this problem. The units & modules were produced for Hornby by Hammant & Morgan, who also sold their own parallel & compatible system. The dual BD139 transistor chips are more resilient to the high current demands of Wrenn & Hornby Dublo locomotives.

3:50 Teddy Boston there, good friend and neighbour of Thomas creator Rev W. Awdry.

i remeber getting the hornby flying scotsman when i was little (i still have it today)

I love Hornby trains, when I was young I want to get all the trains and train sets and make a big train set with loads of trains, carriages, props and so on, shame some sets are discontinued but seeing the Flying Scotsman is still around, I have the Queen of Scots and Smokey Joe train sets, I wanna get more but waiting until I have a chance to do so

Great video but you missed the factory in Margate and the fact they have a visitor centre there now that is brilliant

You really should do videos on some of the American manufacturers like Lionel, American Flyer, Ives, etc. Great video!

Another excellent video. Hopefully you can do the Triang story which of course included the Spot-On range.

Very nice to see this, love it !

Brilliant Thank You! Remember Zero 1 system i think you also had to solder the chips into the electronics of the loco. Thank you for the shot of the Inter city 125. Great Video. PS i think Mamod steam models would be a great topic. :)

Loved my trains as a kid 👌

My first train set was a Lima with a car transporter and a container lift. I added Hornby bits and pieces when I could. The best place to visit for trains and Lego and Action Man was Victor Rainey’s shop at Long’s Corner in Belfast.

Excellent!

I really feel up to date! Got the divorce, now all I need is the train set!

Great topic. I’m a N and G Scale modeler. 👍🏽👍🏽

I wish I had your level of info and footage. My kit model documentaries are not near;y so slick. Yours are very professional.

The price for the Zeo 1 slave controllers was criminal, as all they contained was a rheostat slider and a two way switch! All the electronics were already built in to the master unit! I bought just one slave and added two further rheostats and switchis into that case. :-)

Good old live steam! Love i! :-)

Random recommendation. Except Frank and my great grandfather were best friends and he lent him the money to start Meccano. Theyre buried next to each other in our local church.

As a side note, there is, or really, was, an "American OO". 1:76 scale trains on 1:76 scale track. HO track is 5/8" wide, American OO track is 3/4" wide. Lionel and Scale-Craft were two major makers of the scale before WWII. HO scale existed alongside it, and before the war, it was a toss-up on which scale would become dominant. The two were so close in size most felt it would end up being one or the other. Manufacturing advances made possible by the war effort helped ensure the slightly smaller HO won out. In short, "American OO" needs its own scale track. "British OO" uses HO track. Our hobby does have an interesting history!

It's weird hearing someone call O scale "zero"

I remember when I was a kid having a Playcraft plastic railway set in fact I think I might have had several

Awesome dude as always. Did you watch the 2episode series James May narrated on Hornby?

Thanks for this. Will you be doing some on plastic models too like Airfix?

Possibly a video on Bachman or Lionel?

"Keeping the faith" - I see what you did there!

Will you be doing Majorette too? My personal favourite.

I've been really enjoying your productions, rather pleased at how professional the productions are. I must admit thoroughly enjoying the toy ones. And a big thank you for correctly pronouncing it as gauge zero, as it started out and remains today on the continent. As the advent of "double oh" in 1938 evidences, zero had already started to become oh in the years proceeding. Marklin, whom did the first 00 in 1935 (TTR and Bing were "table top"), pronounced it as spur null null, gauge zero zero. Unfortunately the examples of Henry Greenly's letters I have explaining the origins of OO (there was a whole lot more than just the motor size fyi) he fails to indicate OO or 00, the letters to the press we know are authored by Henry Greenly, but typed up by whom? to give an indication Lionel's early catalogues saw the ad department stating 2", 2 1/4" and 2 1/8" through different year catalogues to describe exactly the same track size. O and 0 may have ended up solely the prerogative of whomever set the typeface....

Great video again. The monk or priest has found a nice way to deal with celibacy :D

3:34 Fun fact this man here is teddy Boston a friend of rev w Audrey the creator of Thomas the tank engine

you should make a video about tyco

I'm one of those younger generation you mention. I'm 18 and refuse to buy anything from hornby. Quality across the range is lacking when compared with the asking price. I dont think that not many younger customers are coming into the hobby but that they are shopping elsewhere. Like I shop at either bachmann or heljan for the right price.

The Electric train that was the few, sold in France, if that was the Metropolitain, I have one.

Micro machines next

My Type 20 with British Railways livery (similar to those at 50 seconds) still goes after more than fifty years of use and abuse.

While Hornby is still going strong with steamies and rolling stock, Bachmann have turned a new corner. New Thomas & Friends models, from Bachmann, will be on the shelves either June or July 2020. So Thomas & Friends are due to make a successful comeback, for all us Thomas Fans.

Excellent. What about Märklin - I remember when I was a kid these were the Rolls Royce/Mercedes Benz of toy railways. We were not rich enough, but I got a badly made battery train set that I was not very happy with and this ruined my love for small railways.....

I always thought Dapol was pronounced to rhyme with the fruit. The name was a portmanteau of the founders' names wasn't it?

At this point may I ask you for an episode on Tomica?

From what I understand, Hornby saved Airfix. Am I right?

What is Hornsby doing with the Corgi brand? There’s nothing like the Corgi Classics or Heritage line on their website. It’s pretty much slim pickings.

I like all your work, but it seems you talk significantly faster on the Little Car videos.

3:30 - "Keeping the faith" - we see what you did there!

I would have any model trains unless I was gonna make a short film with a runaway train.

From 2:55 that layout isn't Hornby Dublo - it's Trix Twin. Similar system, but inferior locomotives and rolling stock compared to Hornby Dublo!

The gauge system is in letters, not numbers... it's O gauge, not 0 gauge!

I love midel railways. And its weird how they didnt change since like the 60's.

leve me my toys .an old man.

Honestly Hornby and many other model train manufacturer's are completely responsible for their financial problems themselves. Of course new people aren't entering the hobby when the average price for a single locomotive is 120 pounds and anything under 70 is a miracle, and that's just for a locomotive, you'd still need to buy rolling stock, a controller and rails seperately. They're also hampering themselves by making no modern train sets whatsoever. Kids and young people have been completely priced out of the market so of course it's basically only pensioners who are customers these days. It's not like there's a lack of interest in trains among younger generations in fact I'd argue the opposite, games like Transport Fewer and Train Simulator are doing amazing and you get entire facebook group dedicated to public transit. I'd say that the younger generations not only have interest in trains but care about them politically, trains are better for the environment and socially and younger generations see that. These manufacturer's need to get their head out of their ass and realize that they need to reduce prices seriously or they'll be going the way of the dodo, the people who are their customers now didn't get into the hobby on 120 pound trains. And I refuse to believe that it actually costs this much to manufactur these trains, they're made of incredibly cheap components like plastic and electric motors and the detail level is not that high. If LEGO who is generally considered expensive when it comes to toys can sell a complete train set with rolling stock and rails for 70 pounds (and it's LEGO so you can highly customize it) then Hornby can damn well figure out to take some old tooling and rerelease those trains for at most 50 pounds but really under that. And perhaps also make a few more modern trains like high speed trains and modern electric. Seriously these traditional model manufacturers are being put to shame by other companies.

They should never have moved production to China. Yes finer detail but in terms of actual quality, it's hit or miss

Hornby should be OK they invented the train set and what's not to like about a train set.

Hornby had a chance to dominate the digital command control (DCC) market with their Zero 1 controller and receivers. The Zero 1 was leaps and bounds ahead of competitors, right when DCC was set to take over the scale model market. The marketing decision to require their DCC system if you wanted to run DCC was a disastrous mistake. Large swathes of scale model layouts still ran straight DC in 1980, so anything successful would have to allow for DCC and DC locomotives to work on the same layout. This error made it so the US National Model Railroad Association, which was establishing DCC standards in the late 80's, to eliminate Horny from the running. By that time, Hornby had already filed for bankruptcy, and they simply didn't have the money to fix some of these issues. Digitrack in the US and Marklin in Europe soon came to dominate the DCC business, and Britain.

Well this is depressing news for the hobby.

Never Zero Gauge - O (Oh) Gauge, please! Day-pol is also odd. It’s Da-pol! (Founders were a David and Pauline) Otherwise very well done.

‘Haitch’ - Aaaaaggghhhh! Please make it stop!

NOW BAD COMPANY

Montrez nous a l'échelle ZERO la locomotive CITY of GLASGOW Avec laquelle j'ai joué enfant v'etait pas une vraie Pacifique 231 des essieux en moins