I set out to write a survey of the Tinprinted Train and its successors in the manner of the blow-by-blow locomotive surveys I have written in these pages before, but, like Topsy, it just grew. The murky history of this product is, of course, one of the great controversies of the toy train world and, as I delved into the subject I found myself being sucked into the debate. There is a lesson that I frequently deliver to my students, NEVER trust your sources no matter how convincing they seem– always cross reference them, but I hold my hand up to admit to my own guilt in not following it in this case until almost too late. This resulted in things taken for granted by no less authorities than Chris and Julie Graebe and Jim Gamble, that I had blithely written into the draft, being undermined at the last minute by my instant suspicion of the trade journal references of a much less reliable source, the late Marguerite Fawdry. These took me to the British Library at Colindale where, just out of interest, I also checked Ken Brown’s references…much painful revision was the consequence. In fact, this project has been more like my academic job than any previous one I have done for the HRCA, in that it has called upon the contents of the National Archives, the British Library and the world of economic and political history to as large an extent as the empirical evidence of the objects themselves. Even these latter are further ranging than is usual, drawing in non-train related Meccano products, and those of a number of other manufacturers. The outcome is not just one article, but three, each looking at a different aspect of the extraordinary story that lies behind what, at first sight, is one of the least impressive Meccano products. For those readers who will accuse me of going off-topic and into too much ‘irrelevant detail’, I apologise, but for the others (and I hope the majority) what I present here gives the very essence of what underpinned the design and marketing decisions that resulted in the creation of Hornby Trains, with a considerable input from Frank Hornby himself.