Happy Birthday Frank (Hornby)

It was Frank Hornby’s 150^th anniversary this week. Google celebrated with a special “Google Doodle” on the UK website. It set me off wondering what Hornby meant to me.

There is no question that Frank Hornby was an inspired entrepreneur. He popularised mechanical engineering to a whole generation of kids by inventing Meccano. Yet by the time I was in my childhood, Meccano was being trumped by Lego – you could build fantastic things in Lego much quicker, and much more easily. And I think that the wonders of engineering had been all too readily accepted by then. The wonder material through the Victorian and Edwardian eras had been iron and steel, but by the 1950’s the new wonder material was undoubtedly concrete. Meccano looked like the Victorian great structures such as the Forth rail bridge, but Lego looked like the South Bank centre and the National Theatre in London.

Of course, whilst it is well known that Frank Hornby invented Meccano, it is the model rail system named after him that is more famous today. There is a link in his development of the Meccano idea to early trains, which led his company onto the Hornby Double O system. Looking back at the various books and web resources. you can see some great model trains which were developed through to the 1960’s – models I look at with a bit of longing in my mind.

My first loco - a Playcraft clockwork 0-4-0

My first train set wasn’t Hornby set. By the time I was old enough to get involved in trains, Tri-ang had come along and set up in competition to Hornby. Tri-ang was part of the great toy empire of the Lines Brothers, and they had access into every toy shop in the country. But the launch of Tri-ang set other people’s minds in motion, and Playcraft did a deal with the French firm of Jouef to introduce a range of British look alike train sets, sold mainly by Woolworths. These sets were much cheaper than either Tri-ang or Hornby, the cheapest was one penny less than a pound – equivalent to around £20 at today's values. You can’t find anything equivalent to that sort of value even today. 

Playcraft sets were great, but the range was never that developed. As I grew older, Playcraft became harder to find, but Tri-ang was everywhere. I soon became a convert to Tri-ang. There were problems though – the rails didn’t match as the rail connectors were on different sides (when you put a playcraft rail up to a Tri-ang rail, both connectors were on the same side, leaving the other side without any connectors). Although it wasn’t obvious to me as a child, the height of the rails were also different.

The underside plate to my loco with Playcraft's name and Jouef diamond logos

What saved the day from my point of view was that Tri-ang merged with a firm I had only vaguely heard of – Hornby. As part of the merger, special adaptor rails were introduced to let Hornby track interconnect with Tri-ang – and guess what; they fitted Playcraft track as well. 

So from a very personal point of view I’m grateful to Hornby, but in a very backhanded compliment sort of way – it was only the demise of his train system that helped me out!

Being more than a little older now, I can look back and start to appreciate, both the imagination which led him to launch model train sets in the UK, and also the attention to detail they still show to this day. Of course history moves on and much later, the Lines Brothers' toy empire fell, and Tri-ang Trains were sold off. They were re-branded as “Hornby” and the modern system which bears Frank’s name is arguably much more a product of Tri-ang than of the original Hornby model system. And in their new guise Hornby have been very creative, they have ramped up the accuracy, and have tried very hard to respond to what their buyers want. For the current generation of children, Hornby means model trains, and a great inspiration they are too!.

Codename Strikefore – wishing for a little bit more…

I have spent a lot of time over the last few months looking at the video of Codename Strikeforce as I learn how to edit –then forget – then relearn it again! It’s given me a chance to think about my own views about the set. There is no doubt that Al enjoys it; but I think Hornby could have done a lot more with it.

Hornby’s recent history is of a failing company that was brought back to life by a dedicated management team who refused to give up on the brand and the concept. They realised they had to attract serious (i.e. adult) modellers for whom the lack of detail on the older models was a source of irritation. They have succeeded heroically in this. The problem has been attracting the youngsters. After all, the serious adult modellers with the serious money to spend all started off when they were kids – the future of model rail as a hobby lies in keeping interest alive in a generation where the instant entertainment of the internet, a host of TV channels and games consoles poses serious competition.  In the last couple of years Hornby has introduced the Railroad series – a cheaper option with some of the expensive detailing being omitted in favour of price. This seems to me to have been a real success.

Codename Strikeforce has to be considered as another option along these lines. I just think they could have done much more mainly by including operating accessories to fit with the main trainset. For another £20 they could have included a remote controlled helicopter – Maplin have two on their website for £19.99. The iconic Tri=ang Battle Space range, made between 1966 and 1973 included lots of operating accessories: tanks which fired missiles, a satellite launcher, Rocket launcher (which fired rockets!), even an exploding car. Nowadays I would expect to see remote controlled tanks rather than the fairly plastic – almost Christmas cracker level – attempts which are actually included. I would also have thought there was a market for selling the individual items, but I haven’t found them in the catalogue yet. Surely Hornby could get additional sales by offering individual items which would fit in with the Codename Strikeforce set?  So overall, whilst Al enjoys it, I think there are more opportunities here which Hornby are still missing. But don’t get me wrong – there is no-one else out there doing anything similar that I am aware of; so well done Hornby for taking us this far. The set runs well, and the specialist Trakmat helps create the “story”. Keep it going, Hornby – but maybe raise your sights a bit?

Codename Strike Force - Our Video goes live!

I have finally uploaded our video of Al's Codename Strikeforce set. Check it out here - or pop over to our  Youtube channel.

I don't like reading other bloggers apologies about the time it takes them to update their blogs - so I'll try not to bore you - just to say sorry its taken so long! This video editing stuff takes quite a lot of time - and concentration - and that sort of quality time in our household is in short supply. We're too busy living life and having fun when we can!

Hornby train set review: Codename Strike Force

Hi I am Al, alande’s dad’s son and this is my review on my train set "Codename: Strike-Force".

Codename Strike-Force is a great train set. It includes 1 locomotive 2 carriages with special plates each to hold vehicles, 1 guard van, 2 tanks, 2 land rovers, about 10 men, 3 barricades, a track mat and a medium sized set of track. I enjoy playing with this great train set because you can do so much with it. My favourite thing to do is to act out war scenes where the solders, a tank and a land rover get polverated by the train and the carriages. Codename Strike-Force is a great train set for kids but maybe not for great collectors because it does not have anything that might have any historic value.

Al.

Al and E’s Dad adds: look out for the video coming shortly, showing the Codename Strike Force train set in action.

Geometric Designs

In a previous post I talked about track geometry. I explained about the problem I had had with a full straight track section being used instead of two quarter sections. Here is an illustration which shows the difference between a quarter section (R610), two quarter sections joined together and a full straight (R600) - all of these are Hornby current track sections.

In looking back, I remembered that it took me some time to realise that “track geometry” was the magic phrase (the one to put into google) to help me work out how to get a layout working properly. I suspect too many of us would rather leave “geometry” as a vaguely remembered school topic long since relegated for much more useful things.

As a kid I remember pulling out my trainset and fitting all the track together from time to time, and being mystified why some curves seemed to end up in one place and others went somewhere else. With all the ingenuity of a 10 year old, this was seldom a problem – pushing it a bit usually worked, after a fashion!

As a now adult helper to Al and E, this “push until it does fit” approach no longer washes. I had to find out what was going on. It fairly quickly became apparent that Hornby, and Tri-ang before them, make curves that allow you to build three concentric circles (circles within circles). In fact Hornby introduced a fourth circle not so long ago.  These go by the names of first, second third and now fourth radius. In each radius it takes eight standard curve sections to create a circle, and if you had all four circles they would sit one inside the other with 67 mm between them - enough clearance to allow trains to go around them without interfering with the trains on the next circle. Hornby have a useful diagram showing how the different pieces fit together; you can find it on the Hornby website, but its not that obvious so you might like the direct link just to the diagram, which is

http://www.hornby.com/_assets/files/Track-Geometry-PDF.pdf

When the dust settled

I left off the blog at the point where I had got the layout running again after the dust had all been cleared away. But summer intervened, and it’s taken us a long time to get back to the train set again. And at first it seemed like we were going to have all sorts of problems – the first three locos I tried to run all had problems of one sort or another – which I put down to poor conductivity on the rails. Then I came across one of my son’s star locos – a Hornby class 08 diesel model (an R156). And it sped around the track like there was no tomorrow! (Not bad for a shunter which according to some sources was only supposed to run at 20 mph in real life!).

Hornby R156 - a Class 08 Diesel

Now one difference was that the diesel had been kept out of sight in a storage drawer. It is also one of the more modern models, and one of the more recent additions to our collection. So the problem seemed to be more with the locos than the rails. I thought I would test the power running through the rails at different points using a small cheap multimeter I had picked up from Maplin for about a tenner. It’s a mysterious gadget if your knowledge about electrics is as rusty as mine is! But I managed to get consistent readings of 13v pretty much anywhere I tested (using a straight 12 V input from a small transformed rather than the Hornby power control equipment). It was much later that I worked out that I should have been testing current in amps, not the voltage! In any event it persuaded me to look harder at the loco’s rather than the rails.

So I picked up the Eddie Stobart loco intending to add a little more oil to see if that would improve things. But before I could do that I noticed the state of the wheels – filthy! And sure enough the wheels on the other locos’s were all in a pretty poor state too. So there we were on Saturday afternoon. Mum was out at the shops, Al had finished his homework and E had been to ballet and gotten back again. “What are your doing, Dad?” they asked, and soon enough, all three of us were sitting around the breakfast table, fully engaged in our Railway Maintenance Working Party. Each of us worked on the wheels of a different loco, just rubbing them gently with a paper tissue; a pile of blackened tissues as testament to our work. Mum came back, so we only had a quick chance to do some test running – and what an improvement.

Eddie Stobart Hauler video

Here's a video of the Eddie Stobart Hauler running on our layout. As you can see we are still experimenting with the video technique! 

Al’s first model train set

The first train set we got for Al was – of course – a Hornby set. In the UK, “toy” trains and Hornby are synonymous. (Yes, “toys”; since Al was only about 4 year old). Hornby sets are available from all sorts of retailers, in real shops, as well as online, and of course in specialist model shops. We went to a small model shop with an upstairs dedicated to sets. Sadly this shop went out of business a few years ago. They were specialists and stocked other makes of train. Names which at the time I hadn't heard of, such as Bachman. You see this was a “model” shop, not a “toy” shop, and if you haven't found out yet there is a big difference between the two.

Hornby's Eddie Stobart Engine

The set was a great success with Al. He had seen a model train loco at his grandfather's and that got him asking about train sets. We found some of my old set – but this train set was his very own. The set we bought for him was Hornby’s R1061, Eddie Stobart Hauler. I think my review score of it would be “mixed”; it has a great little engine which is still one of the fastest in the family collection; it was an “operating” set – in other words it does more than just go around the tracks; and all of Hornby's train sets are great value compared to buying the individual components. 

  

I think Hornby is in a bit of a fix. It’s managed to build a great revival in its fortunes since the decline of train sets forced the previous owners to give up, and the company which is now Hornby Hobbies was formed. They built that revival, partly on moving manufacture to China, but also on higher degrees of accuracy. They shifted their market focus to adult buyers and away from toy trains. Many of their models are now highly detailed, and they work hard to be true to the original full size versions (what the modelling world calls the “prototype”). And of course adults have more money to spend!

Hornby's Eddie Stobart Goods Container Wagon 

 What I think they have missed is that adult modellers have usually started out as children playing with toy trains. Much of their catalogue is too expensive for kids – in fact even their catalogue itself is pricey on a pocket money budget. They have thankfully introduced the Railroad range in the last couple of years – which is going in the right direction.

  

  

Hornby's Eddie Stobart lowmac wagon

So for me the downsides of the Eddie Stobart set were firstly, the branding itself –Hornby and Stobart chose to use their original c.1950’s branding - but it certainly isn’t the brand image which the kids see on every motorway journey these days. Then there are the wagons – the lowmac and the bogie wagon are both low profile models which feel fairly delicate and are often a fiddle to place correctly onto the tracks. 

  

Finally the operating tipper is a clever piece of engineering, designed to have one edge tip up and unload a pile of – pretty unconvincing – “logs” over the side.  In order to drop over the side, the side rail has to rotate out of the way. But the hinge arrangements are incredibly fine pieces of plastic. With a bit of less than gentle handling, the side comes off, and its then quite a challenge for a child to put it back correctly.

But despite my whingeing, the set has its strong points as well. The inclusion of the Hornby TrakMat I think is a really great invention. It immediately transforms the track into a fantasy setting. It helps you visualise the setting of the railway – the platforms, the engine sheds, and the roadways to service the railway. And the little Eddie Stobart Loco, as I’ve already said, is still one of the fastest in the family collection. So we still look out for the Eddie Stobart lorries on the motorway as we travel around the country, and as we see them, every one is a reminder of the train set waiting for us to get back home again!