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I am one of the many users who have a fond appreciation of Rivarossi. Founded by Mr. Riva and Mr. Rossi shortly after the end of the second world war Rivarrosi has long been known as a manufacturer of quality Ho model railway equipment. Naturally the firm has produced many FS models but also from other european countries, Germany and France in particular. It will not be surprising to find that their station structures are in the italian style. As an extra adjunct american prototypes were produced from 1957, initially but just for one year as Lionel Ho, then distributed for a while by Athearn and then for many years by AHM, right up to Rivarossi's collapse in 2003. Prior to that Rivarossi had aquired Lima in 1994 followed by both Jouef and Arnold in 1997.

For many these north american models were the best value models that Rivarossi produced, certainly the models produced by the likes of Tyco (Mantua), Bachmann, Roundhouse, Life-Like and Athearn in those days came nowhere near the quality in either accuracy of proportions, detailing or performance and to do better on detailing you had to stump up for oriental brass. The Big Boy was a particularly impressive model and well designed with sufficient weight to pull long trains yet having a chassis which allowed it to get round 48 cm curves (admittedly in an unprototypical way). The rolling stock was a similar step-up for the injection moulded competition with interiors as standard on passenger coaches and metal wheelrims on everything. In the 1970s AHM persuaded them to adopt rp25 flanges and Rivarossi also introduced a simple coupler socket which made changing from european to american hook couplers a trivial task. Incidentally the Virginia and Truckee old west models were initially produced by Pocher but their model railway products were taken over by Rivarossi leaving Pocher to concentrate on their highly detailed 1:8 scale automobile models. It has also been said that the arrival of the Big Boy finally pushed the Lines Brothers to bring out their first Evening Star model, a far simpler task to my mind, no articulation and the 9F's notable daylight under the boiler simply obtained by opting for tender drive. The collapse of Rivarossi in 2003 was a sad time. A year later and some of their designs were again available with european prototypes arriving under the Hornby umbrella and american models being offered by Walthers but all production having been moved to China. More recently a proportion of the Rivarossi american back catalogue has appeared under the Hornby group umbrella and the Allegheny and Big Boy can be ordered again with or without DCC and sound. New model of both european and american prototypes are now arriving though some of the american rolling stock is reserved for the american market.

I am trading under the Micro Entrepreneur regime, I pay the equivalent of TVA/VAT sales tax up-front when I buy goods and I can not exempt this for any purchasers who might be TVA/VAT registered.

Although "Monsieur Vapeur" was registered in 2018 the Hornby Hobbies dealer registration was only obtained in 2019. In comparison with other shops I would not expect to instantly hold large stocks but would hope to offer a simple ordering service at an attractive price. Therefore please understand that there will be some delay before you receive items. I order on a roughly fortnightly basis. If the items are in stock at the warehouse it will probably take a week to reach me and another week in the post before it is due to be delivered to you. It must therefore be understood that there could be a four week delay before delivery. In some instance it might be quicker but you should not rely on that. If this delay is not acceptable then please do not place an order.


Due to my location in the countryside of France's Massif Centrale I am not expecting passing trade but that is not to say that I do not like meeting other model railway enthusiasts or possible potential customers. If you would like to meet up then please do not set off in blind hope, contact me to arrange a rendez-vous first. I do sometimes post on the AFRM website (a group of english speaking railway modellers in France).


French is not my natural language, and for the limited range of words that I do understand my speed of translation is slow. If you are able to speak english I will be able to answer your queries more quickly. If you want to contact me please use email. If you speak french (or another language) then please either use a translation facility (such as Google translate) or at least understand that I will be trying to use such a system on your text so please avoid abbreviations, slang or idioms that are likely to provide problems for a silicon based translation.


I am happy to post within metropolitan France and also the "western" EC countries (United Kingdom, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Luxembourg, Monaco, Republic of Ireland) plus the Channel Isles. When using the site please select between the "France" or "other country" shipping option (if you should make a mistake on this then you can zero out the shopping basket and start again).This is not to say that I may not consider posting to other countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Singapore or Japan who generally have a reliable delivery system and if you happen to live in one of those and would like to buy anything then please contact me and I will see what can be arranged for shipping.

A further comment on postage costs: I am initially having to guess at the likely cost of posting single items. I would agree that adding in a duplicate item ought not to double the cost however I am having to make a choice within the options of the Paypal shopping cart and have defaulted to the method where there is no postage discount for multiple items (which worked for my previous web shops where multiple item purchases were not that common). If you are buying lots of compact and lightweight items then I can either offer to refund the excess postage or, if you prefer to pay the correct amount in the first instance, send me an email with your items and I can then make a specific invoice for that bundle.

Although, as a dealer, I have full access to the Hornby Hobbies image bank I have been surprised to see that many items in the Rivarossi catalogue do not have individual stock images to download although images may well exist within their printed and on-line or downloadable catalogues. If the web pages on this site do not show pictures of an item that you are interested and want to view an image then may I suggest that you search within the catalogues or alternatively see what your preferred internet search engine pulls up.

You should also understand that some of the older items in the catalogues will be out of production whilst newer ones may not yet have been produced.

My individual product line pages are intended to show the items that are available in the warehouse now or slated for production and open for pre-order. Please understand that I use the predicted production dates as provided by the factory or importer and these may be subject to delay.


For those interested in Rivarossi products may I suggest the "Rivarossi Memory" website.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CofjAmtkgG4