Hornby International

Like many retailers at the end of the 1990's. we sold Lima OO trains. These models were fairly basic, robust and pretty cheap. The importer would announce 3-4 models every 3 months, you placed your order and awaited their arrival.

There was no chance to order extra, or decline those which had not seen much consumer interest! Limited Editions were always popular - and we believe at times the Limited quantity was higher than a typical production run of a similar Non-Limited item from Lima!

We were aware that Lima also had a European range and with Fleischmann and Marklin selling well by 2003 we had been pushing to access the bigger global range with no success. So, when the Lima group called in Receivers and Hornby made an offer we were delighted!

After the successful acqusition, we visited Hornby for the January previews and saw a room full of Italian Lima models - plus Arnold N scale, Rivarossi and Jouef brands. We placed orders for the full range of what was annoucned as 'Hornby International' and on our arrival back home I bought four new domain names - variants of www.hornby-international.com !!!

By 2006 our sales of Hornby International had become significant and the range now including Electrotren was selling nicely. 

In late 2007 Hornby in the UK decided to cease importing the European models and we pitched to become Distirbuor instead - it turned out we were selling 50% of all UK sales and were given the distributorship from January 2008

We held the distributorship for 5 years and grew the business by 2000%. We even managed to create relationships with the Tesco Clubcard team and offered a train set purely for Tesco points.

So, in 2017 when Tim was asked to join Hornby as Chief Operating Officer, it was natural his first job was to try and fix the now badly broken Hornby International.

In 2019 as the turnaround was becoming evident he wrote the Official history of the 16 brands Hornby owned. 

The Hornby International story can be read here.