Lima ( Lavarazione Italia Metalli ed Affini) was founded to produce toy cars & boats etc in 1949. in 1958 they moved into producing toy trains which were manufactured in HO Scale. They made their first N Gauge models in 1966, there were Italian outline (surprise surprise) and they were available in the UK. Lines Brothers, who owned Tri Ang did a deal with Lima in 1967 whereby they used one of their subsidiaries, G&R Wrenn, to sell the Lima products and they then allowed Lima to produce their Big Big Train under license.
Because of the success of their N Gauge models Lima decided in 1973 to enter the British market because there was only one main supplier at the time. Unfortunately for them they entered with HO scale models and as they were smaller than their OO Gauge counterparts they did not do as well as expected. They slowly started to replace their HO models with OO models and by 1977 they had completely replaced the HO ones.
In 1977 Wrenn withdrew from their agreement with Lima and it is around this time that Lexie Keady and John Byrne were introduced to the Lima people because of their friendship with the Wrenn brothers.
So starting with HO and moving onto N & OO we can see where we were before the current Murphy Models catalogue was produced and get down on our hands and knees to thank the man for saving us from these models.
First Irish set produced
Lima HO Supertrain Set 5516T