Category:Hornby

This section of the Museum's KnowledgeBank is undergoing drastic expansion during 2013, as part of the Museum's Heritage Lottery Funded Frank Hornby 150th Anniversary project

Toy Brands and Manufacturers
Hornby

"Hornby Trains" logo, 1925 [image info]

The "Hornby" brand (named after Meccano Ltd.'s founder, Frank Hornby) is normally associated with model railways (originally "Hornby Series" and "Hornby Trains" / "Hornby Railways" in gauge 0, followed by the smaller 00-gauge Hornby Dublo brand).

However, British toymaking companies in the early C20th were known for a certain fluidity regarding their branding, and the "Hornby" and "Meccano" names drifted onto and off a number of ranges of toys made by the company. One of the most notably "non-train" brands associated with the Hornby name was "Hornby Boats".

History

Post-WW2

As a predominantly "metal-minded" company, Meccano Ltd. had trouble adjusting to a post-War era in which plastic mouldings were becoming more common and increasing in quality. By the end of the 1950s the company seemed to be showing obvious signs of difficulties, and the company and its assets were bought out by Lines Bros in 1963.

After the Meccano Ltd. period, the history of the Hornby brand becomes very complex - Hornby was merged with the Lines Bros brand Triang to become Triang Hornby, some of the tooling was disposed of to outside companies, and in a period of great upheavals in the UK toy industry, Lines Bros themselves then went bankrupt.

It's difficult to describe the exact series of events that took place in this later period in enough detail to be accurate without providing so much detail as to make the account very tedious, so ... skipping a few decades, Hornby is now the flagship brand of Hornby Hobbies, which also owns a number of other classic European model railway brands.

The present day

Hornby Hobbies now also has some other famous British toy brands such as Airfix and Corgi, and has a large visitor centre in Margate that looks after the legacy of their main brandnames (including Hornby and Scalextric).

In the Museum

Since the Museum's emphasis is on the period up until around the 1950's, most of the Museum's collection of Hornby items focuses on the "Meccano Ltd" years. However, most of the trains that we run on the 00-gauge layout are modern Hornby items, and the trains that we're currently using for the layout are the new, hightly-detailed issues of the Brighton Belle and Coronation Scot trains, made by and generously donated to the Museum by Hornby.

In the Shop

Although the Museum Shop mostly resells "period" trains and doesn't attempt to compete with "normal" model railway shops, we do make an exception for the Hornby "Brighton Belle" sets, which are usually running on the layout, and which go nicely with our Brighton Belle display and the Brighton Belle mural on the side of the Museum. For any other modern train enquiries, we usually refer customers to the nearby ModelZone shop.