Coryton

I'm not so sure about that. Surely there were halts on branch lines, few if any of which would have separate "express" and stopping services? In fact I can think of one "halt" which I think was the terminus of a branch line for a while. And in some cases a "stopping place" was whatever someone wanted. I don't know if it's still the case, but in the late 90's it was possible to request long distance VIA services in Canada to stop wherever you liked. I encountered a similar principle on the Alaska Railroad route from Anchorage to Fairbanks - the guard came through the carriage (it was a short train) asking people what milepost they wanted to get off at, and it then stopped here and there, at places without even an obvious path into the woods. The guard helped people lower their luggage down onto the ground from the baggage car, and off they went. into the wilderness. One couple with a rubber dingy got off just before a bridge over a big river A very unusual experience. Quite time consuming though. I think it took 12 hours - and we met ONE train going the other way in all that time. I got the plane back and it was quite a bit faster.

It does, of course, depend on whether they still have the tooling for all of these in good condition. It's quite possible that some has been lost or damaged. Didn't they re-release the Lima 67 though? But not in the RailRoad range.

Well that sounds reasonable by today's standards. Bon Accord's post which I may have misinterpreted seemed to be saying that "strongpoint+harness+standby man+other appropriate PPE+rescue plan" was required for all working at height without any minimum height whatsoever.

This sounds a bit extreme. The corporate health and safety course I went on a few years ago made it clear that there were strict rules about using stepladders for short jobs (e.g. changing a light bulb) but did not say that they could not be used. If no working at any height above the ground is permitted without a safety harness, what about a theatre stage with an orchestra pit in front? Or staff (or passengers) on a railway platform? Climbing into the cab of a 66 from track level? How about people on pavements? If there is no minimum height...

Ah, but if it was in entirely new condition, it probably wouldn't be unique. But what are the chances that another one has exactly the same creases and scuffs in the same places? Surely that makes it rarer still?

As was discussed (in a previous thread, I think), there can be strong incentives if you are going to make a loss to make it a big one, rather than have further losses down the line, not least because often managers get a profit-related bonus but generally don't have this balanced by money taken from their pay packet depending on the size of a loss. So it really does matter (to them) how the loss is distributed. Ideally I presume would be for the goods to stay exactly where they are but to change ownership as they sit on the shelf. Which does raise the question of how much of the "stock" they have too much of is out on shelves in concessions rather than in a warehouse. As they say, turnover is vanity, profit is sanity, cash is reality. Of course cash isn't everything. I am currently working on a project which has cost us large amounts of money, very little of which has been paid for yet by the customer. This is all according to the contract and the risk of the money failing to come in is very small. But viewing the last year in pure cash terms would make it seem disastrous. Coming from a science background and now being involved in company* management, it has been fascinating seeing that accountancy isn't as I'd thought an endeavour in which every single penny is accounted for in a rigorously formal manner but something far less precise and dependent on opinion. * On a far smaller scale then Hornby While I'm sure that were Hornby to suddenly vanish from the face of the earth along with all their tooling, there would be considerable knock-on effects from the lack of competition and reduction in range, there are quite a few companies producing top end models. What I would miss the most would be the Railroad end - cheap enough for me to consider buying and re-painting/weathering/hacking about in a way which I couldn't bring myself to for something much more detailed. Apart from the cost if it all goes wrong, I would find it hard to bring myself to sully a beautifully detailed and painted superdetailed model, whereas with a bare plastic Railroad model I feel even my limited skills produce an improvement in appearance.

Goodwill is an interesting example of how profit and loss is not straightforward. If I remember correctly from an accounting course a few years back, if a company considers itself to have built up goodwill it can't include it in the accounts. However, if it buys another company, it can then include whatever part of the sale price was considered to be for "goodwill" on the balance sheet. So if - to take a simplistic example - company A buys company B for £10M, getting £6M worth of machinery, stock etc. and the rest is considered goodwill, the £10M outgoing is balanced by £10M in assets and shows no net change in profit and loss. If later it becomes clear that the goodwill was worthless at the time of purchase (and I'm not saying this is what has happened to Hornby), you end up with a £4M loss in a later year, which by rights should have gone into the year company B was purchased. Of course whoever is in charge when this happens might not be the person who agreed to buy company B for £10M.... I find it fascinating that something as fundamental seeming as profit and less can depend on such intangible concepts as goodwill - which incidentally shows why there can be so much uncertainty over the correct amount of corporation tax companies should pay. This is of course not the only subjective part of profit and loss. You have to decide how much stock is worth, how much risk you are carrying for goods that have been sold and are still under warranty, what rate to depreciate equipment at etc. etc.

I hate that. A bit more understandable when people are trying to sleep, but still annoying. I once had a bit of an argument with an airline customer service agent because according to SeatGuru the seat I'd been assigned was a window seat with no actual window. She was sure that none of their planes had such a thing. I persisted, and to humour me (and presumably get me off the line) she moved me a few seats back. Fast-forward a few months. I board the plane, sit down next to my nice window....and listen to the argument a few rows ahead between a flight attendant and the irate passenger who had just discovered his window wasn't. In the end some off duty pilots swapped seats to preserve the honour of their airline... Edited in a futile attempt to not look quite so far off topic: Er....sometimes it can be interesting watching tiny trains out of an aeroplane window...

Or vice versa, as presumably will happen to cope with the delays to electrification.

This may be a silly question (and apologies if it's been answered elsewhere), but as (I believe) even the non-bi-modes have a diesel engine giving limited power, couldn't the depots have been left largely unwired and the sets moved around them on diesel power? They presumably don't need much power to do so. Wouldn't this have saved quite a bit of money in building the depots, and also make them a safer environment? I'm sure there is a good reason because these things don't generally happen because nobody thought of doing it differently...but I'd be curious to know what the reason it.

I've certainly heard of organisations getting into a mess because the salesmen were paid commission on sale price not profit, so it was in their interests to cut margins to next to nothing to get a sale...

I suppose that depends how you look at it. Some people collect things, and want one of everything in a set. If a new whatever-it-is comes out, then they want it because it's there. But then you could say they will benefit from it because it means they have a full set...

Reminds me of an experience a few years ago where the university I worked in offered an exclusive interview to BBC breakfast. The university was then contacted by the 10:00 news (or whatever it was then) but had to say no. While the breakfast people were there I heard one of them on the phone selling rights to the interview to News 24...

Indeed. If I walk into a model shop and ask a question, I have no way of knowing if the person behind the counter knows what they are talking about. I'm sure we've all had the experience of a customer in a shop being confidently told something that is wrong. But on here if someone comes out with questionable advice someone else is likely to wade in, and in some cases you can see from blogs/other posts that the person clearly knows what they are talking about in any case. Not that I want to see model shops vanish...

I presume this means to concentrate the losses into one year or other reporting period, not to deliberately make losses worse overall. I suspect one big bit of bad news can go down better than lots of little bits of bad news. Also, it is common for people to get profit-related bonuses but no equivalent penalty for losses. So if you aren't going to get a bonus one year, best to stick as much loss as possible in that year - you have nothing to lose financially - to increase profit the next year in the expectation that it will increase your bonus. There are various ways to move profit/loss around. Possibly the big stock write-off needn't have been taken as a single hit.

Does that mean they start out as EM and end up as 00?

Perhaps because this is a significant change after decades of Peco selling HO track as 00, and people saying that the market for 00 track is too small for Peco to bother with (despite it being somehow worth making 009/HOe and HOm track).

Bachmann Branchline sell an H0 tamper for the UK market with 1/76 scale written on the box. You might say the Hornby RailRoad ex-Lima Deltic is an H0/00 locomotive...

Indeed. If Hornby had sold stock to dealers in January they'd have the cash now (assuming 30 day terms). If it's sitting in their warehouse, waiting for a web order, they have nothing now. And if they need that cash in a hurry and sell at a heavy discount, they are likely to get less than the trade price when they do sell it. In the short term, I suppose whoever bought things at a big discount as gained. But in the long term, I don't think it helps anyone. Of course running a company from an armchair is as easy as armchair modelling...

Well I know next to nothing about the Lima take-over, but I remember seeing photos of Hornby employees looking through a room of tools that they had just acquired. But presumably Lima already had the tools in their possession, rather than them being in one or more factories they don't own on a different continent.

Very interesting. But if - as you say - getting the tools back is difficult then it seems rather academic whether the tools are tied to a particular machine or not. However, if for whatever reason the notional ownership of the tools were to change hands, and the new owner went to the factory and said they'd like to pay for more models to be made using the tools, the factory would be unlikely to say no....assuming they hadn't chucked the tools out by then. But presumably any take-over now would be unlike when Hornby took over Lima and acquired a room full of tools.

There have been so many new models produced in the last few years that I wonder how dreadful it would be for the hobby if this were to drastically slow down. While I'm sure there are plenty of models yet to be made that people out there want, the range of existing tooling is enormous. Of course it may be that the financial model for model railways now relies on a constant stream of new designs, just as the economy appears to require constant growth. In both cases, it's not clear to me how this can go on for ever.

Indeed. So far as I know, the brief version is as follow. The tooling used by Palitoy for models sold in the UK under the Mainline brand was owned by Kader, who produced the models for them. When Palitoy decided to end production of Mainline, the existing stock was sold to Dapol, but not the tooling in China. Replica Railways then did a deal with Kader to use the tools to produce models for them. This lasted for a while until Kader decided they wanted to sell directly into the UK and established the Bachmann UK brand to do so, initially using the Mainline tooling. I'm sure I will be corrected if this is wrong.

Yes and of course they are the exception to my comment that only Hornby caters for low-end models. As well as the Dapol unpainted wagons there are also their incredibly cheap coaches, also available for even less as kits to save you the bother of taking them apart to repaint or do more serious things to them.

End of the world as we know it? Of course not. But if Hornby (AND all its tooling - unlikely) were to vanish, I think most of us would see a significant change in one way or another. In particular, with the exception of the very small Bachmann Junior range (if it still exists) other companies aren't going for the low end models. Putting aside issues of what effect train sets and the Railroad range have on bringing people into the hobby (and whether we care or not), I would certainly miss the availability of cheap rolling stock to play around with. There are often comments here suggesting that people should do real modelling rather than just plonking RTR stock on the track. And maybe one day I will have the courage to paint/weather/modify a £100+ locomotive. But if it ever happens it will only be by practising on cheaper models first. Second hand goes some way to satisfy that need, but - for example - I've just bought a couple of brand new Hornby 0-4-0s split from set for ~£12 each. At that price I can give them to the kids to have a go at repainting. I would miss the availability of such things.