According to the news media Hornby Plc, the British maker of Scalextric racing cars, train sets and Airfix plastic model planes, said on Thursday that it had made a solid start to the new financial year.

The company, which posted lower-than-expected annual profits in June, said that its order intake has been growing significantly and that orders for its Airfix and Humbrol brands, bought in November, have been very encouraging

"Forward orders are much stronger than the equivalent position last year", Chairman Neil Johnson said in the statement. "With a strong pipeline of new product launches, we are very well placed to continue to drive both sales and profit growth."

The company has recently acquired the licence of the BBC Worldwide ‘Doctor Who’ series for a range of Airfix model planes. The first of these, featuring the character's time travel machine, the Tardis, will be launched in time for Christmas.

McLaren Formula One also licensed the rights to produce a range of Lewis Hamilton Scalextric cars to Hornby. And the company already entered negotiations for a new range of products based on the current top movie Transformers.

Trading at the group's core model railway division is progressing well. The chairman added that, after a period of reorganisation, the group's European operations are now "starting to make a significant contribution to the overall group performance"