50A55B

I don't think it is unfairly denigrating the model, which is in overall terms pretty good. It does however have a 'face' issue which is so important for diesels. The headcode area doesn't look right to me, as evidenced in the photos. If you're happy with it fair enough, they won't be getting any of my money.

Duplicate post.

This photo shows the big problem for me. Bachmann's headcode glazing is correctly slightly recessed (although the real thing graduates from nearly flush at the bottom to more recessed at the top) whereas the Heljan panel looks fairly flush to the front . If someone could check the size of the headcode characters that would be interesting, they should be 4mm in height as the real things were 1 ft tall. Here's a close up of the real thing.

As well as that, it’s a Toffee Apple. Presumably working back to London after attention at Doncaster Works, a nice rare capture well away from its usual territory.

It would be an E headcode if so David. I don’t have my WTTs to hand today but l have a vague recollection that B was the NER code for York Division for internal workings.

Leeds - Northallerton direct closed in March 1967 so there had been a timetable change by December 1967, nevertheless the continuation of no stop for this train at York would seem to be the most probable reason for this apparently unusual occurrence.

It looks to have 8 seating bay windows though, so it may be one of the early TSOs built without the centre door.

Interesting. 143 was a Bath Road loco in 1969 and the allocation sticker looks like it could say Bristol. The numbers look carriage size. The blue has a look of Nanking Blue, did Bath Road use the nearest paint they had to hand for a quick touch up job? Pure speculation but not beyond the bounds of possibility.

Thanks very much for the latest comprehensive update. I’m fairly certain that the first photo was taken at Doncaster Works during acceptance testing.

I think the lettering on the wagon is Hopper Train No.6 rather than Training. I’ve seen other photos of ballast hoppers being lettered as part of numbered hopper trains.

I used Ashford International once in the early days and was struck by how expensive the parking was. Other than that it was a decent enough experience but I never went that way again. I had to change trains at Lille in both directions as it was a journey to/from Lyon and recall that Lille wasn’t a particularly pleasant place to do so.

The York-Malton-Whitby loco hauled sets were a mix of Thompson and BR Suburbans in the last few years of workings (to 1965).

Yet the very few uq arms adjacent look correct. How strange.

The Poole Newcastle/Leeds trains were formed of SR stock until the change to Mk2s (I can’t recall when this happened but some time in the late 70s I think). They carried destination boards until 1974 at least (the traditional cantrail level ones, not the WR ‘continental’ style), long after they were discontinued elsewhere. The BSKs also kept their periscopes long after they had been removed from other examples.

In my last job before retirement I had cause to use RAF aerial photographs of the UK taken in 1946. It turned out there were two sets in the archives, the generally available set and another set which had to be specially ordered. Both were from the same negatives but the easily available set had been censored so that sensitive locations appeared as open countryside complete with field boundaries and woods which didn’t exist in reality at the time.