Category:Hornby Dublo buildings - wood

1938 Hornby-Dublo range, showing wooden stations [image info]

1939 image of the early wooden Hornby-Dublo Engine Shed [image info]

Wooden Hornby-Dublo Island Platform D1 [image info]

When Meccano Ltd. launched their new "Hornby Dublo" 00-gauge model railway range, it was accompanied by a range of wooden station buildings.

This was something of an anomaly for Meccano Ltd., whose emphasis had previously been very much on having everything made out of metal, and when metal wouldn't do, using board. Meccano Ltd,'s output had previously used almost everything at one time or another apart' from wood, and it might be surmised that the company founder, industrial technology enthusiast Frank Hornby, might have been against the use of old-fashioned wood in his modern company's products.

However, Frank had died in 1936, and with the company facing the need to get a full product range into the shops quickly (before Trix Twin Railway established even more of a hold on the new market sector), making the non-critical "ornamental" parts out of wood may have been a sensible short-term fix.

Another factor was that Bassett-Lowke Ltd. and Trix (and their designer Henry Greenly) had shown that, thanks to the new Art Deco construction style using thick block shapes and rectangle-based profiles in cast concrete, perfectly respectable models of these new-style station buildings could be constructed simply, block-style, from painted wood - there was no need to try to represent roof-slates or brickwork, or complex cast-iron pillarwork.

Although the wooden stations still needed to be properly designed, they were then a safe option that could be put straight into production without having to go through a recursive series of tests and checks, as would have to be done with large clip-together cast metal pieces, leaving Meccano Ltd.'s engineers and production engineers free to devote all their energies to the more critical job of making sure that the new miniature locomotives, track and rolling stock worked well with as few production issues as possible.