MODEL RAILWAY HISTORY For there is be a model there has to be an original. Railways have been around for several centuries, there is evidence that wagonways where in Greece as early at 600 BC and certainly in Britain as early as the 1600s. The first steam railway as a goods line was the Stockton and Darlington in 1825 followed by the first passenger railway the Liverpool and Manchester in 1829. By 1840 Railways where a familiar sight through most of Britain.
It is highly likely that between 600BC and 1825 that there would have been quite a number of carpenters living near to wagon ways that took a block of wood added wheels then joined 2 or more of these together for their children. However that aside model railway proper started with carpet trains around 1840 but it was not until the late part of that century that movement in the form of clockwork and later electric motors.
The German company Bing introduced the first commercially available O Gauge models about 1900. It was 20 years later that Hornby O Gauge came onto the market. For the next 2 decades O Gauge was the model popular scale for modelers. During the interwar years modelers experimented with smaller scales notable HO at 3.5mm to a foot. However problems with sizes of motors lead to the adoption of 4mm scale or OO on a HO track, by the end of the 1950's Trix and Hornby started marketing models in the new scale. Things moved on in 1957 Triang launched a smaller TT scale at 3mm to a foot. Whilst Lone Star went smaller with a push along diecast train in N scale. TT caught on but from the late 1960's N Gauge got a following. This however was not enough to take the dominant position of OO.
For the purpose of this site as it is primarily dealing with the products of Frank Hornby we are restricting scales to O Gauge and smaller. Initially we will just deal with Hornby O Gauge, Hornby Dublo, Triang Railways, Triang Hornby and Hornby Minitrix. But in the future we will expand this to other companies. |
MAIN EVENTS OF MODEL RAILWAYS
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