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So, before I even knew about wargaming I had a fascination with models. My father was an architect as I grew up and I spent many hours in his office staring at his models and making them come to life.
I never had a trainset as a kid but was always amazed by them, Lego, Mechano, Airfix and an old blown plastic farmyard set all featured heavily in my childhood playtime.
Some 25 years ago, was a toy/model/hobby store in Leamington Spa called ToyTown where I first learned of wargaming miniatures and they were the next logical step for me and I've been playing and collecting ever since.
So, hats off to you Mr Hornby i'm sure that you were the catalyst for a lot of us older gamers and perhaps some of the younger ones?

1st ever kit was a 1/72 scale Airfix airoplane. Happy birthday mister Hornby.
150 for you to blow out.

 Alex Kolodotschko wrote:
So, before I even knew about wargaming I had a fascination with models. My father was an architect as I grew up and I spent many hours in his office staring at his models and making them come to life.
I never had a trainset as a kid but was always amazed by them, Lego, Mechano, Airfix and an old blown plastic farmyard set all featured heavily in my childhood playtime.
Some 25 years ago, was a toy/model/hobby store in Leamington Spa called ToyTown where I first learned of wargaming miniatures and they were the next logical step for me and I've been playing and collecting ever since.
So, hats off to you Mr Hornby i'm sure that you were the catalyst for a lot of us older gamers and perhaps some of the younger ones?

I think I may have been to that shop. 25yrs ago on my 8th birthday, we went swimming at the baths in leamington spa and I got bought some gobots from a toy shop...Thats a blast from the past.

We had a trainset. Well, I say we (me and my brother) but how many 8 and 11 year olds have a model of their local town and are only allowed to buy trains that would have been going through there in the 1950's?
Thanks Dad

But happy birthday hornby

I had Hornby 00 train sets long before I had ever even heard of wargaming. I was actually reminiscing today outside a junkshop that had Hornby trains for sale.

Great fun but you could never keep the damn things working for long on your bedroom carpet. Pets, siblings and parents hovering were the main culprits for this. Why did the track power coupling always wear out?

So happy anniversary Hornby, top products that even now I will pour over for ages but never buy - who has the room?

My love for models and small toys is obvious upon reflection.

At the age of 3 I had a Seasame St. play set that was a tree with bugs in it. I don't really remember the big muppets too well.

At the same time I had a friend with a large collection of Battle Beasts.

Kindergarden was Dinoriders, Dinosausers, GI Joe and Heman.

I also collected all of the Playschool Dinosaurs and cavemen up until the Chasmasaurus because I felt I was getting to old.

Next was Ninja Turtles, Mighty Max and the Lego Pirates sets.

Then I moved onto X-Men and general Marvel Action Figures.

Then Star Wars action figures and models.

Then in highschool I was introduced to 40k and it's been my hobby ever since.

I was also into Heroquest during middleschool without ever knowing about GW.

When I was a child... I was utterly convinced that Lego was the coolest and best toy ever.

This is an opinion that has not changed since the 1960s.

Wargaming I got into around 1974 - introduced to the hobby by a Catholic priest. (Some folks have horror stories about priests when they were children. The priest concerned introduced me to wargaming, role playing games, and mimeograph machines. He has much to answer for.... I wish I still had copies of my 'zine from back then, churned out on a Roneograph.)

The Auld Grump I ran into the priest about ten years ago - he remembers my D&D games more kindly than I do....

The man, the legend, the hero!

For me it was Playmobil and Playbig when i was a kid, then some airplane model kit (and some anime mecha kits before anime was known).

I then became a metal head and it all changed when i got a Boltthrower CD in my hand, with all these interesting images inside. That got me into wargaming

My first model kit was the iconic 1/72 Airfix spitfire.
One of my cousins had meccano as a kid (we were about the same age) that I played with and learned about assembly and mechanical stuff.

I left it behind in high school, and switched to electronics, before getting back into gaming at the age of 19 (at uni). I found 20mm WW2, then it became moderns (cold war gone hot stuff - late 80s before the wall fell) and then I found 40k and it kinda went downhill from there.

I've got a brother-in-law who collects Hornby trains and meccano though - and even at my spendiest, he still outspends me on his hobbies. I'd never dream of spending $3k on a single model. He spend $6K on one train. LOCOMOTIVE.

ok, IT WAS A 3" GAUGE train (ride on).

1977, a Mustang which may have been Airfix, lead to a fascination with plastic models which still lasts to this day, although I now specialise in all things German from WW2, particularly those amazing 'what-if' projects.

I had a Hornby 00 train set wen I was a kid in the 70's, it's packed away under my bed now, not set up for 25 years. But I still love that train set, it used to be set up in the loft of my parents old house. Not much in the way of scenery but plenty of track and engines.

We have a 1/24 scale Harrier, the old 1980s one, sitting in a corner of the bedroom... just waiting.

A real shame that the present day company has shifted production to China; but there's encouraging news, that, they've started a trail run of some snap-together models in the UK.

They've given a lot of kids a lot of fun in those 150 years. Good on 'em.

I never did have Meccano, but I had some Swedish ripoff product that I absolutely loved. You could build anything with that.

I'd take Brio Mec (as it's called) over Lego any day.

My earliest kits I remember building were an Airfix Harrier Jump Jet, and a much larger Lancaster bomber and a B17. Like every little boy I had them hanging from my ceiling, but compared with my modelling skills today they're atrocious: thick, glossy paint everywhere, silly camo scheme with little link to the actual vehicle camo. They've long gone, thrown away years ago, but they'll always have a special place in my memories as my first venture into the hobby.

I can remember when I was younger my dad having this huge train table that was literally half our basement. When we moved around the time I turned 8, it was disassembled and never reassembled, but I'll always have extremely fond memories of it. In hindsight, it's one thing I really wish my mom had taken pictures of, she's always been big on amateur photography, so it's not like we don't have a bunch of pictures of pretty much everything else.

For myself, I had all the major boys toys, from Legos, to Super Friends (I had nearly the entire line), He Man (still one of my favorite cartoons), Thundercats (again, had the entire line), Ninja Turtles and all the Toy Biz marvel figures (to this day still my favorite set of toys). I still find myself taking trips down the Toy aisle in Wal Mart, and picking something up every so often just because I think it looks fun.

Happy birthday mr hornby

First kit and exsposure was RTB 01

Ahh, my Grandad had a huge collection of Meccanno - i remember he built a scale model of the Eiffel tower but it was so big that he couldn't fit it in the living room at it's full height, so the top couple of feet was stood separately next to the main structure ! He also had a massive hoard of Hornby OO - the track was the original tin type and his layout took out a whole bedroom in his house - wonderful days staying at the grandparents. Sadly my parents sold it all off to collectors after he passed away :(

A Hornby train set was my introduction to models as a kid, my dad had a large track set up in the attic for me and my sister. We still haven the set boxed up now gathering dust.

Moved onto scalectrix as I got a bit older.

Lego was a huge part of my childhood and I still collect it now. In fact I have a lego mini fig of myself and the wife made by a artist friend of ours called The Little Artists. They made it for our wedding.

We have had a GW in York for many years, it was the 9th GW store to ever open and in my early teens I first picked up wargaming.

Stopped in my later teens only to pick it back up in my late twenty's.

Models, figures and plastic kits have been a part of my life since forever and in one way or another always will be.

I started off with Lego and Transformers figures (I used to love swapping the weapons, my first taste of WYSIWYG). Later on I started collecting model fighter planes, which was my first introduction to the painting/modelling side of things.

I started out with Legos and model trains as a kid. It helped that my uncle was a mechanic for the Maryland and Pennsylvania railroad and that my dad would put up trains around our Christmas tree each year. From there the model building took hold which helped lead me into miniatures when I was a teenager.

I was exposed to Lego at an early age thanks to my older cousin's Space Lego sets from the late 70's. From there I moved on to GI JOE and built dioramas in the dirt with my friends and during our countless battles arguments would erupt over exactly who shot whom. That craving for a rules system to organize our GI JOE battles caused me to gravitate to wargaming when my cousin ( the same one who let me play with his Space Lego sets) let me read through his Battletech books when I was 8 or 9 years old. After that I was hooked.

I grew up with Lego since I was two years old, and always enjoyed building a range of everything. I used to have a table where I built a city and every so often, I'd half destroy it when my lego star wars droid army came along. It was an RPG of sorts as I had a load of characters and stuff, I'd bring friends over and have the Battle for BrickTown. Twas a lot of fun for me. When I was very young, I had a wooden train set if that counts?
When I was eleven, my dad suggested that I should buy that airfix kit on the shelf over there, it was a 1/72 Northrop F5A Freedom fighter and we painted it in the Iranian air force colour scheme. Looking at it on my shelf now, it was awfully painted, but I love it. My dad was a big modeller in the 70's, so my interest comes from him I guess.