Nothing very thrilling here, just a trio of Airfix BR meat vans, now pressed back into service with Spratt & Winkle couplings on the outer vehicles. Actually, there's a bit more to it than that as two of the vehicles are from the original Airfix kits, purchased and made more than thirty years ago, while the third was built about twenty years later from the Dapol reissue of the same kit. Without turning them upside down to look at the colour of the plastic, or the maker's trademark on the base of the chassis, I can't tell them apart now. The Dapol kit had slightly different decals, not - in my view - as fine looking as the original Airfix ones, but after a coat of weathering, the differences are blended in. At some point I fitted bearings and scale wheels to the original models, replacing the chunky wheels that came with the kits.

I painted them BR maroon; I'm not sure if crimson wouldn't have been more appropriate but again it doesn't really matter once they're weathered. I must admit to finding these vehicles very attractive, triggering all sorts of memories. Once, during a family visit to Barry in what would have the very early nineteen seventies, I remember seeing wagons or vans gathered in sidings and having the distinct impression that they were a red colour, which I think may be my only encounter with maroon stock, if it happened at all. Perhaps it didn't, but in any case I've always been partial to a bit of maroon, accounting for far too many parcels vans and full brakes among my collection.

Supposedly BR meat wagons are far more common on layouts than they ever were in real life, but it's not hard to see why when these superbly designed kits would have been readily available at pocket money prices for so many years - literally several generations.

In similar vein, but moving into the purely Dapol era, here are another three wagons built from kits that were once part of the Airfix range. I built these Presflo wagons as a batch and then sprayed them a bright shade of gloss yellow. It helped with the decals, but ever since then I found it hard to achieve a satisfactory weathered look, and they still need some more work - maybe some whitish traces around the upper surfaces?

These went together fairly well but I'm not a fan of the soapy-type plastic Dapol were using back then and I found it hard to assemble the chassis really square, meaning that a lot of work was needed afterwards to get satisfactory running with a minimum of wobble. At the same I also built one of their Interfrigo vans, and that was almost banana-shaped by the time I'd finished it. I then discovered that it wasn't to 00 scale anyway, but was more suitable for HO, so I never bothered trying to fix it.

In any case, as superb as the Bachmann Presflos are, these Airfix-heritage models can certainly hold their own in terms of basic detail and shape.

Cheers!