Having bought some rolling stock from Model Railways Direct in Portishead, I get an e-mail from them about once a week with new additions to the store. Most is not N Gauge, and I realise that Hornby don't make N Gauge rolling stock, but in the e-mail I received this morning there is a long list of deletions by Hornby, apparently of items which they had originally projected to manufacture and presumably now will not. It does add that they may review this for 2013 in the light of customer feedback.
A bit ominous.
Chris
It could be they are just cutting back on development till the economy picks up again.
With the amount of people losing their jobs off they may be realising sales are down already.
It would be interesting to see a demographic of which groups of people have model railways as their hobby.
This has been debated a lot on another forum; it seems that they aren't deletions, cancellations, etc, but are items that have now been put back from 2012 until 2013 ...
Shot themselves in the foot, in my opinion, seeing as they did a big fuss about releasing all 2012 items in 2012 (unlike 2010 & 2011) - and then having to go back in this way ...
Mike