Oxford Diecast is one of the UK’s leading suppliers of 1:43 diecast cars, vans and trucks. They’ve been producing a wide range of different cars and light commercial vehicles for many years now and have developed an extensive portfolio of individual product lines across many scales/gauges. We’ve put together a selection of 1:43 commercial vehicles based around a number of themes that are currently available which we’re sure will help bring your O gauge model railway layout to life. We trust you’ll find our initial offering of British Railways era car derived vans and light commercials of particular interest.

The Swansea based Oxford Diecast company rose from the ashes of the former Mettoy Company in 1993. Lyndon Davies whose career began in the 1970s, aged just 16, learnt every facet of the diecast business at the Fforestfach plant, and with two colleagues set up Oxford Diecast following Mettoy’s financial difficulties.

From the outset the company focused on a broader market beyond the toy segment focusing on collector, gift, hobby and promotional markets and the development of collectors’ clubs. Oxford Diecast now produces between 400/500 new design models every year, commercial vehicles, planes, buses and coaches, army vehicles joining the car range across a wide range of scales using Chinese manufacturing production serving a global market with particular emphasis on the Anglosphere. The Oxford Diecast business is managed by Eloise Davies, the daughter of Lyndon Davies, having learnt the business as a toddler taking up the helm as managing director in October 2017.

In 2017 Hornby acquired a 49 per cent stake in LCD Enterprises, Oxford Diecast’s parent, for £1.6m whilst in July 2021 it bought the remainder 51 per cent of LCD that Hornby did not already own for £1.3m from (Hornby’s) CEO Lyndon Davies and his wife. The complementarity and synergies of both businesses are well recognised. Both Oxford Diecast (and Corgi’s) 1:43 products remain a key element of Hornby Hobbies – a household name and the UK brand leader in the model railway hobby – and their growing portfolio of leisure pastime themed businesses. The complicated inter-woven narrative of corporate ownership associated with the world-wide toy, collector and hobbies industry is never far from view.

Whilst Oxford Diecast have been extremely active in all scale segments, it has been at the forefront of developing the 1:43 scale market with a range of vehicles, particularly light commercial vans, that appeal to the O gauge model railway fraternity. Many of the vehicles have and will continue to appear in highly distinctive British Railways and earlier Big Four liveries.