The story
Manufacturer Georges Huard founded Jouef in 1944 toward the end of World War II. The traditional home of the company was in Champagnole, France. In the early 1950s, as with many manufacturers, the company abandoned the use of lithographed tinplate for trains in favour of plastic injection moulding.
In 1979, Jouef opened a factory in Limerick, Ireland, but the ill-fated venture closed in 1981. In 2001, Jouef was subsumed by the Italian Lima. After Lima shut down in January 2004, the Jouef brand was acquired a few months later by Hornby Railways.
From Wikipedia’s article on Jouef, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3