Model Railway Forum

The relationships between the companies seems pretty incestuous to me. Isn’t there some relationship between Dapol and Hornby?

Totally untrue.

Okay, I was only asking!

The only thing that could give the impression of a ‘relationship’ is that old tooling has been sold off to others over the years.

That might be it. I’m sure I read something about Dapol buying Airfix stuff, or was that the other way round, or Dapol buying sone stuff from Hornby. I didn’t pay a lot of attention at the time.

Dapol bought some Airfix then Hornby bought some Dapol. Nothing to do with working together.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for the clarification.

It was all messy due to Dapol copying toolings so what Hornby got in 1996 was a mixture of former Airfix toolings and Dapols copies along with most of Dapols own models. The conflat and container sold by Hornby is the 1978 Airfix conflat tooling with the container being a Dapol copy ; the 1978 Airfix container tooling having been acquired by Kader and has appeared with various Bachmann conflats. Dapol had to tool a further container up in 1997 to use with the copy conflat tooling that it had retained. Source: Ramsays British Model Trains Catalogue.

All very interesting— thanks for the clarification.

Going back to the price increases.
Latest sales flyer from Hornby offering the final fling DCC-Ready not -Fitted HST book end pair for a penny under £330 and matching coaches at over £40 apiece. This hobby is getting over-priced.

OO isn’t far short of O prices.