Category:Hornby Dublo three-rail system

1959 image: Hornby Dublo Three-rail Track [image info]

1963: Hornby Dublo Three-rail Track, range [image info]

The three-rail electrical track system launched by Meccano Ltd in 1938 for the Hornby Dublo range was gorgeous to look at, extravagantly engineered, and rather expensive to produce.

The system

Standard track clipped together easily with spring connections, with the rails on a raised bed of angled lithographed metal sheet that kept the wheels of the locos and rolling-stock protected from stray carpet fluff. For track points, the company went one better and gave the rail points solid diecast metal beds – these were points that were NOT going to shift or lose their connections when you laid them on carpet and ran a heavy train over them.

Everything about the three-rail system oozed quality and "Built to Last a Lifetime" engineering, and if that meant that the system was more expensive as a result, then ... it was still a heck of a lot cheaper than gauge 0, which until the mid-1930s had been the only real mainstream alternative.

1938: Hornby Dublo EDPR points

Problems for three-rail

Things changed for the Dublo three-rail system after World War Two when upstarts like Playcraft and Rovex Plastics started making very cheap train sets with simple two-rail track, and as the market for train sets started to expand beyond Hornby's original (more moneyed) clientele, and the Rovex plastic sets got better and better, (and the Trix TTR system refused to go away) it became clear that the Dublo range needed a more modern (and cheaper) track system to compete.

This resulted in Meccano Ltd. launching a new two-rail system in ~1959. For the next few years, unwilling to alienate their original user-base, they marketed both systems side by side until the company was taken over by Lines Brothers in 1964.