Ever since I was a young boy in the late 1940s, Christmas Day has always reminded me of train sets – primarily Hornby O-gauge tinplate – and to find myself writing about the subject of railway modelling 70 years later is something I would never have predicted in the wildest of dreams.
The amazing thing is that, despite the massive strides forward in accuracy, detail and sophistication in all scales that modellers enjoy today (see part one of Nigel Burkin’s ‘Top model choices from 2019’ feature on pages 20-21), tinplate trains like the simple wind-up Hornby and its two stumpy carriages that I woke up to, wide-eyed, in 1949 have never lost their appeal, and the well-used, carefully stored or simply forgotten about remnants from that golden age remain eagerly sought-after at toy fairs and swapmeets all over the country to this day.
