I am a news junkie. So it was, that while dozing off in bed last night a snippet from the midnight news on Radio 4 penetrated my semi-consciousness. "Deutsche Bahn chief Hartmut Mehdorn has stepped down over a spying scandal," said the announcer, causing a sudden shift in mindset away from my slumbers and back to the mid-1990s, when Mehdorn ran Heidelberg.

It was a memorable period. Heidelberg was transformed into a "total solutions provider" under the energetic Mehdorn, a man we at PrintWeek described as a "tenacious table slammer" because of his habit of punctuating his speech by banging his fist on the desk to emphasise his point while speaking.

There's a view that Mehdorn got it wrong in attempting to make Heidelberg a sort of all-encompassing print conglomerate, but it was an enjoyable ride while it lasted. He departed at the end of 1999 and just three years later the dream was being dismantled under successor Bernhard Schreier.

One thing Mehdorn was right about was the power shift between heavy metal manufacturers and the emerging digital printing suppliers. In a PrintWeek interview back in 1998, in response to accusations that Heidelberg was becoming too large and powerful, he compared the size of the group to giants such as Xerox et al, saying: "Hewlett-Packard, Canon and Xerox are the real competition, that's where the real battle is coming...". He was spot on in that respect.

Mehdorn's somewhat abrupt exit from the railways job means that one of the most charismatic and dynamic CEOs ever to operate in this industry will be at a loose end. Should anyone require the services of a person capable of, say, sticking together two or more large printing press manufacturers he could be just the man for the job.