Hornby Hobbies

Yeah.

Um, but if you didn't and you missed it, we were lucky enough to be trusted with information from Bachman and Hornby on some of their announcements over the summer holidays, to which we did-

Mm-hmm

... uh, two special news episodes based on that.

...

I don't know wagons very well, but I do know these.

So during the April TT announcements I got very excited because the HEAs and HBAs were coming in TT next year from Hornby.

Mm-hmm.

Stop spreading those rumors.

Had my Meccano set, Hornby.

One or two, uh, Transformers.

And then later on, uh, got a ZX Spectrum.

Ford? So I started off here at Formby as a CAD engineer, a CAD designer.

So I was a product designer designing model kits, so airfix kits, plastic kits, and this was before Hornby had acquired Ocker.

I then left to do a couple of different jobs, but one of those jobs was working for Ford Motor Company.

I was an engineer, a component engineer, so I was designing exterior trim components for the Ford Transit.

So yeah, it was a great job and I love working at Ford.

It was a really interesting place to work for four or five years.

You did mention that you worked at Hornby originally, and then you went off to Ford.

Why did you come back to Hornby?

Um, but I, yeah.

One example that I saw recently, um, I think it was in, as we were recording, the current issue of Hornby magazine, shameless plug.

Um, they, one of their articles, they, uh, printed a hopper wagon, 3D printed with a filament printer, which are the sort of accessible ones, um, with no chemicals.

And they made a really nice rake out of it.

And then one of them is if we sort of move slightly horizontal, if you were.

So we move away from, say, the desktop home-based tooling and sort of look at, say, uh, the advantages in new control.

Um, so the famous one being HM7000 by Hornby.

The, uh, Bluetooth chips.

You know, um, BR pioneered some of this operation on America round trains where, you know, the driver was making the train go forwards and backwards, but you can't really say they were doing much more than that.

The train was being signaled through a gigantic kind of Hornby model railway where it would reach the power station, somewhere like Ratcliffe-upon-Soar, by the way.

Would be, the computers would take control of the train, in the '80s, by the way, would take control of the train so they could run extremely slowly.

It would drop all the coal dust by running very slowly through a giant loop, and it would, wouldn't even stop.