Christmas: Hornby Train Set James May: The Reassembler

Hello, viewers. I'm James May, and this is The Reassembler,

the show where we take everyday objects in their component form

and put them back together, very slowly.

That feels very nice.

Oh, yes. Look at that!

'It is only when these much-loved and iconic objects are laid out

'in hundreds of bits...'

Oh, man in heaven.

'and then slowly reassembled

'that you can truly understand and appreciate how they work...'

Total rubbish.

'..and just how ingenious they are.'

It's good, isn't it?

'And if painstakingly putting hundreds of pieces

'back together again...'

That's quite satisfying.

'..wasn't hard enough, I then have to hope...'

Deep joy.

'..that they'll work.'

There's some moisture on my spectacles

because I started weeping.

Now, if you're my sort of age,

that is you were a mere boy back in the early '70s,

then the most coveted,

the most precious of Christmas presents

would have been something like this.

The Triang Hornby Flying Scotsman train set.

And it was absolutely brilliant,

because you just plugged the track together, wired up the transformer,

plonked the locomotive and the coaches on the track

and off it went.

But not here.

Because it's been dismantled into its 138 component parts.

Now, if I was still nine, this would be considered cruel.

But I'm not. I'm 53.

So it's my job to put it back together.

And it's your job not to turn over to BBC Two.

Before computer games and iPads

were at the top of every young boy's Christmas list,

the world was filled with all sorts of disappointing

and uninspiring toys.

But one toy changed Christmas forever.

The electric toy train set.

In 1938,

Hornby released their seminal 00 gauge train set,

which meant that boys all over the country could spend their time

joyously chugging in their rooms,

as I did all through the 1970s.

And this is the actual train set

that Santa gave to me in the Christmas of 1972.

Now, as this train set is powered by electricity,

or as it was still known in the '70s,

the miracle of electricity,

I thought we'd start with the electric motor,

which is these components here.

And what would be really handy is if we had something like

a little plastic tub to put bits in whilst I walk to the bench.

Something like that.

So, there we go.

That's the frame of the motor.

That is the armature and the rotor.

Bolt or screw... We'll come onto that discussion a minute.

..to hold it together.

Backplate, and...

magnet.

What we have here

is actually one of the most numerously produced

miniature electric motors in history.

This series of motors is known as the XO series,

and it's a rather elegant thing.

This is the frame.

This is the rotor,

with the armature on it,

and the commutator,

we'll come onto all that in excruciating detail in a minute.

The first train set I got for Christmas was when I was very small,

so it must've been about 1968.

It was actually second-hand,

because we were poor but we were happy.

They really were absolutely brilliant.

And although this is very crude by modern standards,

it's still a rather gorgeous piece of miniature engineering.

The commutator relies on being very clean,

and it IS fairly clean on this one,

but we can clean it a bit more with a brilliant thing I've got here.

This is a fibreglass pencil.

They're used by people who muck about with small electrical things.

It's very good as a means of polishing things up very, very fine.

So you can use it on copper contacts and so on.

And you can use it on the commutator of the motor.

Again, being very careful not to catch the little copper bits.

Clean, bright and tight is the maxim of old electrical engineers.

Most of them are dead now, so don't worry about it.

Can you see the fibre bristles polish that copper up...

..quite nicely? that makes a huge difference.

I think we'll put the magnet in next.

I'm going to show you something really brilliant,

that somebody gave me.

It is...

a remagnetising device.

No, it isn't. That's a polishing kit from the man who owns this workshop.

Who's moved my magnetising...?

So, that...

is a small magnet remagnetiser.

Magnets are weird things, really,

because in some ways, magnetism is similar to electricity,

but in other ways it isn't.

For example, you can't really insulate magnetism.

That was one of those very smug things

that physics teachers used to say...

..in the olden days.

And study of magnets goes back to...

well, the scientific revolution,

and before that.

And I can tell you just with a simple screwdriver test

that that magnet is pretty weak.

So we'll remagnetise it.

So this device is marked on this side.

North goes that way.

So you put that between the two bars, the two pole pieces.

It's thought that sharks are repelled by magnets.

So if you always go swimming in the Bahamas with a train set,

you'll be fine.

Here we go. Ready?

It's very exciting.

That's it.

However, I bet you...

But I can already feel that that's much stronger than it was.

And to do our little screwdriver test, if I put that there.

Take the same screwdriver, I can now... There you go, look.

I can pick it up.

That's how much better the magnet is.

And that will make the motor more powerful and less prone to overheat,

because it will actually draw less current that way.

Now, to hold that in place is...

..this.

Begs a fascinating question that you can take down to the pub with you,

later. Is that a screw...

..or is it a bolt?

Now, one definition says that a bolt is not threaded all the way up.

As indeed this one isn't.

It has a plain shank because its main function is as a dowel

to line things up, which this does,

cos it passes through the hole in the magnet,

and keeps it all in alignment.

A bolt is secured by a nut,

which we also have, here.

So technically, that, I think, is a bolt.

The definition of a screw,

or one definition of a screw,

is that it passes through a component

and screws into another component.

So, say the screw that goes through the engine case on a chainsaw

and then screws into the body of it.

That's a screw.

Another definition says that it's a screw if it's threaded

all the way along its length,

and a bolt if part of it is not threaded.

Another definition says that if it's small, it's a screw,

because a bolt can't be small.

But I think, technically, that's a bolt.

Right, the 8BA spanner.

It's a very old British standard,

goes on that end.

And we have to put the...

what's called a hairpin spring,

which is going to hold the brushes.

I'll explain all this in a minute.

I mean, I can hear you screaming,

"No, please don't."

But I'm going to anyway.

It's a nicely designed little screw/bolt,

because it has another shoulder on it,

that means the spring remains free even though it's in place.

And you can now feel...

You can't feel, because you're watching the television.

But I can feel that now the magnet is in place and remagnetised,

instead of that spinning freely,

it now moves in a series of little clunks,

cos there's a magnetic field in there.

That's fab, isn't it?

The brushes are made of copper,

and have blobs of carbon on the end

to transfer electricity to the commutator. These are quite grubby.

See? Filth.

The enemy of electricity.

Whatever electricity is.

Nobody really knows, of course.

That goes through there.

I've got to put the other one in.

I can barely see it myself. I'm so blind these days.

There you go.

Now, the interesting thing actually about a toy train from this era.

We're talking about the early 1970s.

It is exactly at that time that the video games started to emerge,

things like the very first Ataris.

In fact, at home we had the very early TV tennis game

with the two white paddles that went...

HE PINGS AND PONGS

I mean, it was rubbish,

but it was exciting if you'd never seen anything like that before.

And things like model railways

went into quite sharp decline

in the '70s for that reason.

And in fact, there was sort of a change of mood...

amongst the people who made these train sets,

because they had been toys, as I said earlier on.

But after that period, they gradually started to realise

that what they were for

was for slightly nostalgic and sad, disappointed old men.

I've got hundreds.

Ha! Right.

So there you go. That is a complete XO4 motor.

A simple thing, but for...

oh, four decades plus,

a maker of dreams.

It may have taken me two hours and 33 minutes,

but that's the motor done.

So now I can get some more bits.

Right, so next we're going to do the chassis and the main driving wheels,

and there is a great deal to talk about here,

because it's one of the bits that you can get utterly wrong on this.

It will never, ever run properly if you get this wrong.

That bush.

That's it. Step this way.

'Fitting the wheels can be a bit fiddly,

'In the same way that keyhole surgery and hostage negotiations

'are a bit fiddly.

'This is because,

'without going into quite as much detail as I would maybe like to,

'the wheels need to be quartered,

'which means that the wheels on one side of the engine are offset

'from the wheels on the other side by a quarter turn

'in order for the pistons to be able to drive them properly.'

See, a lot of people think that toy trains is just a sad thing.

You know how people like to describe things as, "Oh, that's well sad."

And that's probably said about toy trains more than anything else

in the world.

But I don't think it's entirely true,

because some very rock'n'roll-y people...

..have great enthusiasm for toy trains.

Like Rod Stewart for example.

He had leopard-skin trousers,

so you can't really knock him.

Neil Young...

Missy Elliot's got a massive train set.

That's not true, actually. I just made that up, but...

Well, it's done,

and it works.

That is the trickiest part of it, to be honest.

Next, we can go and get the connecting rods,

put those on

and check that I've done the quartering correctly.

'So, now I'm going to take the connecting rods,

'the cylinder block,

'the valve screws

'and the spacer.'

Right. Watch this.

I bet you can't wait.

The original Hornby trains were 0 gauge tin plate clockwork toys.

They were quite big.

And they were the work of Frank Hornby,

who was also the inventor of Meccano.

They were made in Liverpool

and in 1938, Hornby made Hornby 00,

which was half the size.

00, half the size of 0 gauge.

And that was quite successful

and they were very, very nice metal model trains,

very expensive.

Excuse me, I'm just looking for my...

very exciting new screwdriver that I've got.

Anyway, they were reasonably successful,

but they were very expensive. They were generally for posh kids.

My mate Steve, for example, who came from a very posh family,

had Hornby 00.

And then in the 1950s,

a company called Rovex Plastics invented a toy train set,

00 gauge, again, for Marks & Spencers.

And it was quite revolutionary,

because it was made of injection moulded plastic,

which was a new-fangled thing.

And they made it quite cheaply.

They only made, I think, a few hundred sets

before they realised they didn't work very well.

That was when Lines Brothers, who ran the Triang toy empire,

saw what they'd done, bought the company,

refined the idea and gave us Triang trains.

So you had Hornby 00,

which were the expensive posh ones, made out of die-cast metal.

You had Triang, which were made out of the new-fangled plastic,

so were much more toy-like. They had interchangeable parts.

They sacrificed absolute accuracy in the interests of productivity

and low prices and "play value", as we would say now.

Now, what happened next...

I'm just going to have to pause, cos I can't find my new screwdriver.

It's such an exciting screwdriver, you're going to want to see it.

Because, if you were watching the last series,

you'll remember those magic, gripping...

Yeah!

Gripping screwdriver, and I managed to find one for sale on eBay.

There it is, we're going to use that in a minute.

Where had I got to? Yeah, so,

in the 1960s, the Meccano empire,

which had Hornby 00 in its stable, went bust.

And it was bought by Lines Bros, the owner of the Triang empire.

And they promised all the toy train enthusiasts,

"We will merge the Triang toy trains

"with the Hornby 00 series model trains." And they didn't, really.

They plucked a few bits from the Hornby 00 range,

but mainly they just got the name.

It then became Triang Hornby, and that was to placate the enthusiasts,

that's all it was.

It was still really the Triang toy trains empire.

But the weird thing was, in 1972,

Lines Bros went bust because the world was going mad

and there were strikes, and there was an oil crisis,

and all the rest of it.

And the trains division lost the right to use the Triang name,

but they still had the right to use the Hornby name,

even though there wasn't really any of Hornby in the trains,

so they became Hornby Railways, and now they're simply called Hornby,

but actually the trains we get today

are the descendants of the original Triang trains

and the plastic train set that was made for Marks & Spencers

in 1950.

I hope that was useful.

Right, what we're going to do now is...

Because a lot of people do get this wrong and they say,

oh, no, I didn't have Triang, I had a Hornby train set, but they didn't.

They actually had a Triang one. It was just CALLED Hornby.

Hornby had gone. The Hornby trains were lovely.

The tooling was sold to GWR Wrenn,

and they became Wrenn Railways,

which was also actually a division of the Triang empire,

so the whole toy business is very incestuous.

Anyway, never mind that,

look at this.

Here's the brass screw

that has to go in there to hold that extension in place.

There is my new... Oh!

..gripping screwdriver.

Very difficult to find.

And I managed to find one on eBay,

I found several for sale in the States

and they're very expensive,

of course, cos they have to be posted to Britain,

but there was one bloke had one in Britain, this one.

And he knew what it was. He says it's a clever gripping screwdriver.

And nobody else bid on it apart from me, so I got it for about five quid,

which you're probably thinking is a huge amount for a screwdriver,

but not for a screwdriver that changes your life.

OK?

Shut up.

CREW LAUGHS

Right, whilst I was telling you all that,

the chassis extension went in and you didn't even notice.

This is a moment of truth,

cos we're going to find out if my wheel quartering is accurate.

Right, this is a connecting rod.

You see, the hole in the middle

goes on the crank pin.

The two pins at the end...

..at the ends, they go into the holes

..on the other driving wheels.

That should all line up...

..very neatly. Does it?

Yes. Now, if I do the one on the other side,

we will discover that my quartering is absolutely spot-on.

Here we go.

OK.

If I've got this wrong, my reputation's just mud.

They're not secured yet. Lots more to go on.

But we'll give it an initial test.

Oh, man in heaven.

'It's been four hours and 20 minutes since we started,

'and I've only assembled the motor,

'chassis and drive wheels.

'But as soon as I've connected the electrical collector plate,

'things will begin to move on apace.

'Honest.'

When I was a kid,

there was a great deal of excitement in putting the reassembled train

on the track for the first time,

but, to be honest,

usually disappointment,

because I wasn't as good at this when I was a kid.

Now, it still runs smoothly.

OK?

I'm going to put the motor in.

And attach...

..the connections...

..which should, with a bit of luck, make it come alive.

Now, this is always a slightly tricky job,

because we need to put this one screw,

it's a brass screw,

through the end of the motor plate

to attach it to the chassis,

and the problem is always that it's difficult,

cos your screwdriver keeps sticking to the magnet.

What you should really do is have a brass screwdriver,

which I used to have

and I can't find it,

but these days, I've got my gripping screwdriver

which will help with the job.

It's still sticking to the magnet,

but at least it's not jumping out of the screw.

This is a 12 volt...

..train and it generally draws, at the most,

about a quarter of an amp,

maybe a bit more if your magnet's slightly ropey.

It's perfectly safe.

Some of the early electric toy trains weren't.

They ran off really rather big voltages

and blew children up quite regularly,

but children were cheap in the olden days,

so it didn't matter.

When I was a lad I lost most of my mates to train sets.

Now, a feature that Triang introduced,

I think it was during the Triang years,

and it extended into the Triang Hornby years,

but it wasn't used very much and it was quite short lived,

is this glowing firebox feature.

It is just a little light bulb...

..behind a piece of...

..a little piece of coloured semi-translucent plastic, there,

so the bulb is on behind,

gives a sort of yellowy orange glow,

as if the fire is burning

in the locomotive,

which was very innovative in his time.

You have to remember that a lot of things hadn't been invented then.

There were no computer games, none of that stuff that,

you know, we'd spend all our time on these days.

You young people don't realise how lucky you are.

I think this was so short lived because...

..to be honest, it was a bit fiddly...

..and I think it reduced

the effectiveness of the motor, slightly, as well.

But it's here, so we'll have it.

All that is is a bulb, so we have to have a feature on both sides.

There's a clip taking it from the insulated side,

if I can work this other one in here.

It's always tricky.

We will have a feed...

..to the other side, and we should see the bulb come on.

Right, so where you're looking is...

there.

I don't know if it's going to be dark enough for you to see it.

Ready?

Glowing firebox!

TRAIN WHIRS

Like it?

I'm sorry, there's some moisture on my spectacles

because I started weeping when I saw that going.

I mean, I am not the same person as I was when I was nine years old

because, as we know, biologically, we are constantly regenerated

and there are very few molecules in me now that were in me then,

but this train is still the same thing.

Made out of the same stuff.

Look at that.

That's all it does.

Now, I think I'm right in saying

that this one at the front is called a bogey.

That's those bits and those wheels.

And then this one at the back,

this is known as a pony trap.

We'll talk some more about this over here.

Did you know that, when these were still made in Britain,

down in Margate...

the vast majority of the assembly workforce were women

cos they were thought to be, A, better at it

and, B, they had nicer, slenderer fingers

as a general rule,

so they could handle these little bits.

Can you see how much more train-y that is looking,

now that bit's on?

Wait until you see this bit.

It's going to go...

in there onto the little shoulder on the screw, and...

Those, by the way, are screws,

definitely not bolts,

because they go through a component

and then screw into a thread

on another component, not a nut.

So, that's a screw.

Nobody cares.

'I'm six hours and 21 minutes into my reassembly.

'I've constructed the motor and the drive wheels

'and I've attached the motor and glowing firebox to the chassis,

'which means I can return to the glorious table of bits.'

What we are going to assemble next

is something that was deeply innovative back in the day.

It is the locomotive tender with...

Are you ready?

..realistic chuffing sound.

Now, that may not sound like much,

and it wasn't much.

You young people today are used to having the equivalent of

all the world's libraries in your pocket.

We had...

a little metal clip that acted against a piece of sandpaper

and made a noise vaguely like a steam locomotive,

and we were happy.

We weren't, actually,

we were bloody miserable cos the '70s were awful.

Nothing worked properly,

the lights were always going out,

everything was filthy,

the food was terrible,

parents were largely drunk.

It rained a lot as well.

The tender chassis...

features, as I mentioned earlier,

the realistic chuffing sound.

And please be aware that,

at its time, this was the...

the sort of magic ring tone,

the fashionable computer jingle

of its day.

Whole families would come round to our house at the weekend

to hear the realistic chuffing sound from the Flying Scotsman tender.

And I'll explain to you how it works.

Inside the tender is that.

It is a miniature soundbox.

It's really the way a violin works,

only a lot cruder.

RESONANT METALLIC SCRAPING

You can see...

HOLLOW SCRATCHING

..how this can be turned into a realistic chuffing sound.

I'll just have to carefully remind myself how it all goes together.

RAPID SCRATCHING

I know it's not that good,

and it's quite worn out.

It's only really a piece of sandpaper but...

come on!

METALLIC SCRATCHING

-What do we think?

-Cracking.

It's brilliant.

It's a realistic chuffing sound.

This model of the Flying Scotsman, you will notice,

has the so-called corridor tender.

This is so that when the Flying Scotsman did nonstop runs

from London up to Scotland,

a second crew could be having a snooze in the coaches

and they could walk through the coaches

all the way through the tender, there's a tunnel through the middle,

and emerge onto the footplate to drive the train.

Then the other crew could retire.

Brilliant.

They could also pick up water on the move because of the...

trough system and so on.

They really thought about this stuff.

Built in 1923,

the Flying Scotsman is the most famous of all locomotives.

It was the first loco to travel from London to Edinburgh nonstop,

and it was the first British train to reach speeds of 100mph.

It is a true record-breaker,

having travelled over two million miles in its lifetime.

And like my toy version,

it's something we should cherish for ever.

ENGINE SCREAMS

What we're assembling here are the teak coaches of the LNER,

the London and North Eastern Railway, post-grouping,

which was 1923, I think,

but pre-nationalisation,

which was 1968.

Right enough, I've got that wrong.

And I was going to say, actually,

since the train set was one of

the greatest Christmas presents

I ever got, I can also tell you what was the worst,

I think,

which was a combined, folding,

shoehorn and clothes brush.

It's never even been unfolded, actually,

let alone used.

I'd like to tell you about my mate.

I'm not going to use his real name in case he's watching.

Let's call him Bill.

Bill, at the age of ten,

desperately wanted a train set, and about...

..two weeks before his birthday,

he saw his birthday present

in his parents' bedroom,

wrapped up.

It was a train-set-shaped box.

They were distinctive,

you knew what a train set looked like.

And he spent two sleepless weeks

thinking about his train set

that he'd wanted for so long.

On the morning of his birthday he came downstairs,

and his parents, being quite old-fashioned and proper, said,

"You can't have your present yet, you must breakfast first."

So he had a boiled egg and a piece of toast and all this stuff,

while he slowly wet himself with excitement.

Then his parents said, "Right, you can open your present now."

And he tore the wrapping paper off the box to reveal...

HE LAUGHS

..a picture framing kit.

But the real tragedy of it was that my mate Bill was left-handed

so he couldn't use it anyway

cos it was designed for right-handed people!

I still ring him up on his birthday every year to say, "Are you gloomy?"

And he goes "Oh, yes." He's always got a terrible gift of some sort!

Right, that's all there is to it.

It sort of snapped together.

'So, once I've attached the wheels

'and assembled the rest of the carriages,

'we're laughing.'

We have a train.

When you look at old pictures of railway travel,

especially pictures of the insides of coaches from the '20s and '30s,

even the '50s in fact,

you realise that they became very, very luxurious,

very ornate, but that was a massive contrast with the...

medieval toil being endured by the people

who actually had to drive the locomotive,

cos I've had a go at it, firing it and driving it,

and it's just... It's horrendous.

It's like something Hieronymus Bosch would have come up with,

and then thought, "No, that's too ridiculous,

"hell can't actually be that bad. I'd better tone it down a bit."

And people sort of lament the passing of the steam era

and say, "Oh, it was fantastic when you had the 462 and 460,

"and the Britannia class and so on."

But they were just inefficient,

they made a terrible mess,

they were awful for the people who drove them,

and the idea that you went from that and then got into a diesel electric

where you pressed a button and then just move a lever

and sat there in the warm,

with a windscreen wiper clearing the window right in front of you,

it must have been fantastic.

Right, I think this is, philosophically,

quite an important moment

cos as I put the body shell...

That's not really a proper railway term, but it's what it is.

I put the body shell on,

and then it hides all the things

that reveal that this is really just a trick,

and it becomes a locomotive.

Are you ready?

And there it is.

The Flying Scotsman.

How brilliant is that?

Sorry, shall we see if it works?

Put the track together.

Now, of the 138 parts we started with,

we should have eight there, cos that makes a complete circle.

Yes, it does.

Four of those for the straight bits.

And finally,

the power connecting clip,

which connects the transformer to the track.

'After seven hours and 42 minutes of carefree reassembling,

'I can feel the approach of that bittersweet moment.

'Sweet because hopefully my toils will have been productive,

and the train set will run. TRAIN WHIRS

Yet bitter because I know that assembling the track

will bring the process of reassembling to a close.

It was the best of times,

it was the worst of times.

There are many important questions being asked in the world today,

but few as important as this.

Will it run?

More to the point,

will it chuff realistically?

Let's find out.

TRANSFORMER HUMS

TRAIN WHIRS SLOWLY, SPEEDING UP

CHUFFING INTENSIFIES

TRAIN CHUFFS

A happy Christmas.

I hope all your toys reassemble as well as mine did.