According to Chrisé
…a rummage through the back of your cupboard can show you just how far the model railway industry has come in the last 50 years.
Chris compares some of his oldest models to some of his newest.
In my last column I looked back over model railway trade developments in the latter half of the 20th Century and the development of ready-torun model railways rather Above: Notorious for
being the weakest
than toy train sets. We lost
locomotive I ever
Hornby-dublo and gained
tested, this is the
a reinvigorated and review sample of
rebranded Tri-ang-hornby (Palitoy) Mainline’s
BR ‘4MT’ 4-6-0.
operation in Margate.
In parallel with that, Italian Right: Long ago
Lima and German Rivarossi I grafted homemade
and Fleischmann tried to enter Gloucester
cab ends onto my
the UK market with
Trix Trans-pennine
‘HO’ scale. I recall seeing DMU. Years later
a Lima ‘HO’ Class 33 for the I bought the David
Boyle Dapol re-run of
first time in the window of
the model. It lacked
a toy shop in Windsor. the build quality of
It was pretty awful. the original.
Rivarossi dropped British
‘HO’ after two locomotives,
Fleischmann after one, while Lima, under the guidance of their UK agent, swiftly made the change to 4mm:1ft scale. Airfix and Palitoy both entered the market with cheap Chinese-made ‘OO’, intent on carving themselves a piece of Hornby’s action.
I think it is fair to say that at that point, even after Rivarossi dropped out and Palitoy’s Mainline brand swallowed the Airfix range, that the market was pretty crowded. To keep prices down, high volumes had to be ordered and this led to the market becoming saturated and lots of discounted models lying unsold. Even then, with large numbers of modellers from the ‘baby boom’ years as customers, there were more locomotives than there were buyers. If you didn’t mind a 12-wheel diesel with a sidewaysmounted pancake motor and traction tyres, you could make a very cheap start in the hobby.
Alongside that, the cottage industries flourished, making everything you might need to turn your cheap ready-to-run into a halfway decent model.
In so doing, they created a market for better detailed and more expensive ready-to-run which required little or no extra detailing. Toy trains were maturing into scale models and each new release brought better detail and prototype fidelity than the last. When, in the late 1990s, Hornby switched the production of its new Class 92 locomotive to China and followed, in 2000, with the all-new Chinese-built ‘Merchant Navy’ 4-6-2, a new era had begun. Meanwhile, Graham Hubbard had created Bachmann UK and brought order to the chaos of ‘who owns what tooling’ from the sale of the ex-palitoy ranges by US owner General Mills. Over-production took Lima out of the game. David Boyle’s original Dapol organization ploughed its own eccentric furrow until it was taken over and transformed into the company we know today.
There were, perhaps, two or three decades of that transition from toy trains, through what were called at the time ‘proprietary’ ranges, to the ready-to-run ‘high-fidelity’ model railways which we have today. In that time there were undoubted highs and lows, most of the latter now largely forgotten until we look in the back of our cupboards.
Modelling diary: Chris Leigh
In preparation for a staff show-and-tell, I’m working on my layout, as well as projects for Model Rail.
My K’s kit-built GWR railcar was subsequently replaced by the Lima model, and that will soon be replaced by the new Heljan version.
I think it is fair to say that at that point, the market was pretty crowded