Why Hornby product codes start with R?

For the past 50-odd years, all Hornby Railways products have been assigned a product code starting with R.

The numbers are roughly sequential, with higher number meaning more recent releases.

You could expect the letter to have been H for Hornby or even M for Meccano but this is not the case.

The "R" does not mean Railways as one could believe, but comes from the name "Rovex".

Rovex was the name of the railway system created by Line Bros, which was selling items under the Tri-ang brand.

When Line Bros acquired Hornby in 1964, all the Rovex items sold under the Tri-Ang brand got rebranded "Tri-Ang-Hornby" and from 1971, following another change of ownership as "Hornby".

Another way of seeing it is the R comes from Rovex because originally the Hornby plastic products came from the Rovex Railway system.