BachelorBoy

I'm not obsessing. I'm at work and there's b*gg*r all to do and I'm bored. :-)

Every model railway magazine editor has skin in the game in wanting Hornby to survive: who wants an advertiser to go broke? :-) I look forward to reading the interview. Assume for a moment the new management's got the right ideas about the big picture ... but do they have the skills to implement them? I worked for a big organisation a while back. The new head honcho, to my mind, had exactly the right ideas about strategy and how the organisation had to adapt. But he was a bit of smart-arse robot and had no idea how to communicate to workers and management why the changes were needed, let alone how they were to be made. So it didn't end well.

And Hornby's revival has been predicted by every new set of management, and yet its share price is lower than it was thirty years ago, and it continues to lose money. The main shareholders, Phoenix, have an appalling record of choosing duffers to duffers to run Hornby on their behalf. What's different this time?

I very much doubt it would have been successful. The products were embarrassingly bad, according to my steam punk acquaintances.

Just wait until the collectors of never-been-opened-mint-condition models start to downsize to move into elderly homes, and the market is flooded....

Much as consumers rebought all the music they had on LPs in CD form?

Personally I find Hornby's problems fascinating in a car crash way. And also I am annoyed, and even a bit offended, at Hornby's failures. FOR GOODNESS SAKE Hornby GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER !!!!!!

Yes I tend to think of Hornby as really being Triang still. But Triang/Hornby or whatever you want to call them, have been given decades to sort themselves out. Remember, Hornby share price today is lower than it was thirty years ago.

And Shiraz is in Iran.

Well, they've won wars against three nuclear powers. France, America, and China. They deserve to be confident, and feel they have to be wooed.

That would also mean employing a lot more capital. I think the last time I looked, Hornby's return on capital employed was something like minus 32%.

Fair points, but you also should consider how much damage it does by raising expectations which Hornby then doesn't meet.

Everybody wants to befriend the Vietnamese these days. The Japanese are offering help on this, and Xi jinping was in Hanoi a few weeks ago offering to build a new railway to link Vietnam to China.

The membership of clubs may be ageing, and I think that could be a self-reinforcing change: the more they are dominated by older people, the less attractive they are to younger people. Nevertheless, the number of older people is rising absolutely and proportionately in most developed societies. And I suspect that the rise of YouTube has freed many people from the necessity of joining clubs to learn modelling techniques.

Maybe the people are different, but the culture resists change.

I like the idea, but... it sounds like just another distraction for Hornby managers who should really be concentrating on the models/customers/distributors If the catalogue ain't working, break it now, and don't repurpose.

As I remember, the dominant colours of the 1970s were brown and orange.

A decent multimeter? Have you had some bad experiences with indecent multimeters?

They were young once, as well. Perhaps they pretended not to hear, and sniggered about it later in the staff room.

It is not technically incorrect. It IS incorrect. It IS a lie. And you helped to spread it. Yes you did point out your error in a later post. But you didn't apologise for it.

It is. But not for mining lithium. By spreading lies about lithium, it makes it difficult to have proper conversations about the issues.

So your first claim was a lie. Children do not mine for lithium. You are spreading misinformation.

You do seem to be a sucker, Polybear, for dubious claims expressed simplistically and emotionally. Lithium ore is not mined "artisanally" like the picture shows.

Yes, after I posted that I reread your post and realised that you'd given the information. My apologies.