Hornby cancel Titfield Thunderbolt

[The Stationmaster]

News from the Stock Exchange.  Hornby has applied to the Stock Exchange fo permission to issue an additional 3 million ordinary 1p shares.  These will be issued from time to time in order to satisfy the requirement to allot shares under the Company's Long Term Incentive Plan. It is expected that admission will become effective on 3 August 2022.  When issued the new shares will be credited as fully paid up.  

 

They will no doubt be subject to allocation (but presumably not in the way that models ordered by retailers are 'allocated').  Incidentally the Long Term Incentive Plan relates to the financial performance of Hornby Group and is fully explained in the various Reports from the company.

[5735guy]

On 05/07/2022 at 12:43, John M Upton said:

Someone is getting fired....

I believe the blame laid at Simon Kohler's feet. Towards the end of his tenure at Hornby the man became increasingly arrogant. Alienating and clashing with retailers. Major players such as Rail's Of Sheffield and Hatton's took a step back and rightfully so as Hornby had become a money grabbing, ruthless shambles. Only now that Simon Kolher has 'retired'? has some sort of normality returned. Standards have also improved since his departure. Packaging of the most recent releases such as the excellent new 9F and Turbomotive falling in to line with Accurascale, Rapido, Heljan and Bachmann. Those improvements should have happened years ago.

[HExpressD]

46 minutes ago, 5735guy said:

Packaging of the most recent releases such as the excellent new 9F and Turbomotive falling in to line with Accurascale, Rapido, Heljan and Bachmann. Those improvements should have happened years ago.

The first of the new boxes were released while Simon still worked for Hornby, on the 9F

[Bucoops]

48 minutes ago, HExpressD said:

The first of the new boxes were released while Simon still worked for Hornby, on the 9F

 

And others were probably already past the design stage.

 

Having said that, he always came across as arrogant to me.

[The Stationmaster]

1 hour ago, 5735guy said:

I believe the blame laid at Simon Kohler's feet. Towards the end of his tenure at Hornby the man became increasingly arrogant. Alienating and clashing with retailers. Major players such as Rail's Of Sheffield and Hatton's took a step back and rightfully so as Hornby had become a money grabbing, ruthless shambles. Only now that Simon Kolher has 'retired'? has some sort of normality returned. Standards have also improved since his departure. Packaging of the most recent releases such as the excellent new 9F and Turbomotive falling in to line with Accurascale, Rapido, Heljan and Bachmann. Those improvements should have happened years ago.

Quite an outburst but how much of it do you have any real evidence for?

[Free At Last]

2 hours ago, 5735guy said:

 Towards the end of his tenure at Hornby the man became increasingly arrogant.

Television stardom had gone to his head.

[Hal Nail]

Both those posting and those reading this sort of stuff are merely going to adapt the available facts to suit their existing opinion so its a pretty pointless debate.

[Hibelroad]

But the strained relationship between Hornby and retailers, the copyright infringement, the decisions to copy the same models as others and beat them to market, these are all matters of fact not opinion. 

[Ian Hargrave]

Time we moved on ?

[chris p bacon]

23 hours ago, 5735guy said:

I believe the blame laid at Simon Kohler's feet. Towards the end of his tenure at Hornby the man became increasingly arrogant. Alienating and clashing with retailers. Major players such as Rail's Of Sheffield and Hatton's took a step back and rightfully so as Hornby had become a money grabbing, ruthless shambles. Only now that Simon Kolher has 'retired'? has some sort of normality returned. Standards have also improved since his departure. Packaging of the most recent releases such as the excellent new 9F and Turbomotive falling in to line with Accurascale, Rapido, Heljan and Bachmann. Those improvements should have happened years ago.

 

So "you believe" is that actually based on any factual evidence? 

 

The problem with the rest of your post is that it doesn't actually represent the known facts.

[Oldddudders]

2 hours ago, Hibelroad said:

But the strained relationship between Hornby and retailers, the copyright infringement, the decisions to copy the same models as others and beat them to market, these are all matters of fact not opinion. 

The 'need' to steal others' thunder, rather than plough their own furrow, must have been hard on their researchers, who almost certainly didn't suddenly lack imagination and ideas. We are aware that one leading member of that team is now working for a successful upstart rival, which may tell us about Hornby morale in that era. 

[Fireline]

2 hours ago, Hibelroad said:

But the strained relationship between Hornby and retailers, the copyright infringement, the decisions to copy the same models as others and beat them to market, these are all matters of fact not opinion. 

Is it copying if you were already designing/making the model, but hadn't announced it yet? Hornby has had to ditch other projects because they were announced by manufacturers before Hornby had done any major work on them (see Bachmann's 94xx, for example). Yes, the Titfield link should have been binned as soon as it was clear that Rapido had the licence. There is no doubting that. However, Lion was already at the design stage, if not further on, as were the Terriers, when they were announced by others. To me, the more bizarre decisions are the flogging to death of Flying Scotsman, the whole issue of how many Captain Tom 66's were made, and the attempt to carry on with the Titfield nonsense (until common sense prevailed somewhere.) Bearing in mind that Hornby plan ranges several years in advance (at least roughly), it could be several years before the last of the SK effect shakes out of their system.

[The Stationmaster]

Oh dear - as fiction displaces fact it might be time to lock this thread.  One or two facts before then -

 

Hornby did not design the Terrier that appeared to upstage Railss.  It was an Oxford design as study of the early views of it will confirm - Hornby did no research for it and their design team was not involved in the initially released versions.

 

Hornby undoubtedly had 'Lion' on ther list but whether any work was done on it before Rapido's intentions became known is far from clear.  Hornby obviously pressed ahead with its 'Titfield Thunderbolt' and the other film based trainset, without permission from the owners of the film copyright.  Hornby only eventually dropped them (possibly even under threat of legal action?).

 

Hornby were apparently regularly overselling to the retail trade in their mad period of January trade orders and there is one known instance where they were very strongly alleged to have taken stock listed for delivery to a retailer and diverted it to their own direct sale channel.  Tiers were devised as a way of trying to deal with overselling.  However it seems that - for whatever reasons - supplies of various models to retailers, including those in Tier 1, still sometimes failed to match the number which the retail trade had ordered

 

Hornby did not cease to supply one of the major retailers - that retailer ceased to buy from Hornby because, so I understood from one of their Directors, as a consequence of ongoing short supply and various other issues.

 

There is no doubt in my mind that Hornby has become increasingly in need of a major sort out and updating of ts marketing as far as model railways are concerned and I have been criticising its outmoded annual 'big bang' release strategy for a long while.  Hopefully the organisational  changes now being made will improve matters but I suspect that some new releases will not necessarily appear in increased numbers as a result of those changes.

 

I am not going to add names indicating responsibility because in most cases it was quite likely that more than one person was involved or different people were responsible for different things and i haven't got a clue who they were (And i can't name nameseven where my information points to a particular department in teh comany)

 

PS I'm not going to reveal my sources but they are various and diverse.  Almost all of my comments above have come from more than one source which to my mind has helped to confirm what I had been told.

[AY Mod]

4 minutes ago, The Stationmaster said:

Oh dear - as fiction displaces fact it might be time to lock this thread.  

 

It probably is; it had quietened down until someone wanted to give an unqualified opinion.

 

5 minutes ago, The Stationmaster said:

PS I'm not going to reveal my sources but they are various and diverse.  Almost all of my comments above have come from more than one source which to my mind has helped to confirm what I had been told.

 

It all tallies with my sources too who aren't necessarily the same ones. :)