Back in 2004 Hornby acquired Rivarossi along with other well known European toy train names. Along with the purchase came the Rivarossi archive collection. Allegedly it contained about 7,500 items. In the collection were a number of Flyer S gauge items.
It appears that Hornby started disposing of bits of the collection about eight years ago in selected disposals from what I understand, I guess this was not to flood the market with the complete collection in one go. Somehow I missed news of this so never obtained anything direct from the Hornby disposal.
As the years have gone by I have been picking up various items from individuals who confirmed that they purchased them from the Hornby/Rivarossi collection, so I have that provenance. In some cases items have a Dymo label on them but a fair few have had them removed. In fact I removed one from a 316 K5 as it was the first one I acquired that had a label, after that as more pieces came my way I left them on.
As time has passed I have been able to piece back together complete sets or as near possible. The one aspect of putting these sets back together showed that they all seemed to come from the 1954 catalog. The date stamps in the engines confirmed this. To date I have a 371 freight set, 316 passenger set, 466 Comet set, 336 freight set and a 343 wrecker set. I also have a few freight cars that are orphaned like a 919, 914 and a 937. Hopefully it is just a waiting game now until more items become known to me and hopefully I can complete some other sets.
It seems strange as to how it appears complete sets and anything else Flyer ended up with Rivarossi and why so much seems to come from 1954. I have never read of any link between Gilbert and Rivarossi and there may not be an official one or even an unofficial one but it would be interesting to find out how so much came to be in the Rivarossi archive collection.
I did contact Hornby to see if they still had a list of the collection and if they could supply me details of all the Flyer items but they said they couldn’t help. Apparently collectors of Rivarossi and other makes in Europe were not happy with Hornby splitting up the archive collection and wanted it to be kept together.
