BachelorBoy

With film, people took very few photos but printing all of them. With digital, people take lots of photos but print very few of them.

A counterfactual to consider: where would the hobby be now without Thomas the Tank Engine, Harry Potter, Lego, and YouTube?

True. But they don't buy cameras from camera shops :-)

An interesting parallel with model railways: very few camera shops left

Well done for Hatton's for lasting so long! 77-year-old companies, in any line of business in the UK, are rare. This is from the Companies House website

A Beatles trick missed by Hornby. It was, after all, the LIVERPOOL and Manchester Railway

Obviously our TV is a bit of a nanny. :-)

A sewage works in South Korea stopped operations on 1 Jan.

TVs are going down a similar route. Sometimes we can't watch stuff while ours updates.

A bit like Beyer, Peacock. The railway enthusiasts who wrote the Wikipedia page assumed that the company disappeared after it stopped making locomotives. In fact, it carried on making garage doors in Somerset for another decade or two, and was bought by a Saudi Arabian company

It's a typo. He meant skirts :-)

Happy Birthday to Pete Waterman.

It's from the World Happiness Report, and you can find out how it measures happiness here https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2023/world-happiness-trust-and-social-connections-in-times-of-crisis/

Nine of them are monarchies.

Aren't you getting confused with Star Wars ? :-)

I asked Photoshop's AI Generative Fill to fill in the missing bits to guess what your face may look like....

Do you think Hornby is still a "must have" brand for shops (general or specialist) that sell model railways in the way that supermarkets feel they have to stock Heinz and Coca-Cola?

As Yogi Berra is supposed to have said: "If people don't want to come to the ballpark, how are you going to stop them?"

And this popped up too.

I do love the serendipity of the internet ... when looking for one thing, you find something completely different. but nevertheless very interesting. Before there was Design Clever, it appears there was Hornby Clever Cook. (I have to say the skewiff Hornby sticker does look like it may be a later addition to a non-Hornby product)

Didn't you work in Seattle in the late 1990s/early 2000s? Do you remember Hornby's concept shop there?

Thank you everyone. Very helpful As

Does anyone know of a reliable source of facts and figures (or even competently produced estimates) about the hobby in the UK, and further afield? Stuff like: How many railway modellers are there? What's their average spend? What's their breakdown by age and area? How many people use DCC, and how many use DC (and other things like battery power, or even clockwork)? What's the breakdown between the scales, eras, geographical settings (both home and abroad)? How many model shops are there? How many clubs are there? How many members do they have? And, of course, how those figures have changed over the years so we can get an idea of trends. The Guinness Book of World Records was started to help settle arguments. Something similar for the model railway business would be great. I'm sure the big boys have lots of such information, but more information out in the public domain would help smaller companies identify opportunities and avoid mistakes.

A fair point. Actually I really enjoy my job, But Xmas to New Year is always rather dull. And I would be prefer to be at home instead of travelling, eating excess food with the family, and sleeping it off. :-) And perhaps, even, doing some modelling.