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Dapol OO gauge banana van


TravisM
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I’m thinking of getting several of the recently released BR banana vans and I’m trying to find out when the they were repainted from Fyffes yellow to BR bauxite with a Fyffes logo?  Also when was the logo removed and they became just plain bauxite?

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The issue of banana vans has come up before, such as this topic:

 

Basically, there is no evidence that they were ever yellow and as they were all BR owned they were in bauxite from new.

 

It really is about time one of the RTR manufacturers produced an accurate BR era banana van as an alternative to this Dapol abomination.

 

Edited by brushman47544
typos
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I think you need to be very careful about yellow banana vans! I suggest they were, by and large, dreamed up by model manufacturers to interest young modellers?

Certainly any such vans would have been dull yellow rather than the bright yellow of a lot of van models made. 

This topic has been the subject of threads on this site before, but the details escape me at present.

Happy Modelling!! 

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If there were any yellow, it would be the painted disc on the side, and any trader's labels that were carried. The only time I've seen a yellow van, it was a German one, photographed in Germany.

With the replacement of the underframe by one from Red Panda, the Dapol ones aren't too bad. Certainly, if you buy the unpainted bodies, they work out at a fairly reasonable price.

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On 21/05/2021 at 15:34, Tallpaul69 said:

....... any such vans would have been dull yellow rather than the bright yellow .......

They would have been Fyffes corporate colour - whatever exact, eye-catching, shade that was .................... though that's purely hypothetical as they weren't yellow at all.

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I concur; I spent a good bit of my spotting and railway careers in the 60s and 70s familiar with banana vans, which were a common sight at Cardiff on workings from the Geest terminal at Barry Docks and as fitted head on the Llanharry-East Moors iron ore workings.  I never saw any that were not BR bauxite; Geest stickyback labels and the yellow circle circuit working stickers, but the vans were always in BR bauxite livery.  They were also used as fitted heads on imported iron ore trains originating at Barry Docks and going to Corby or Scunthorpe; I worked a few of these to Gloucester for relief, but they were specials not in the WTT.  Hymeks were the usual motive power, and Halls in late steam days.

 

Yellow is an RTR 'pretty colour' marketing exercise, and not prototypical (cue deluge of  photos of yellow banana vans everywhere!).

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The Bodies come up real nice when fitted to the correct Chassis. In this case a Red Panda Vacum fitted 10 ft wb 8 Shoe Clasp Brake chassis kit.

 

Cheers Trailrage 

 

 

 

 

Screenshot_20210531-001958_Gallery.jpg

Edited by TRAILRAGE
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  • 2 years later...
On 31/05/2021 at 06:15, Enterprisingwestern said:

20201024_101940.jpg.60aeff9e0ef5d816271d918381ac0287.jpg

 

The Parkside chassis is OK too.

 

Mike.

 

With excellent Banana vans appearing from Accurascale and Rapido recently I thought I would have a go at a couple of Dapol/Red Panda conversions, for added variety. Am I right in thinking that you did not attempt removal of the spurious body side panels? Instead you seem to have camouflaged them by adding the large chalk board that these van had, plus it looks like you have scored a line to represent the correct pattern corner support?

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The spurious side panels have been removed, you can tell by the presence of the step underneath the number, and although it's not the best picture I have replaced the missing corner support coach bolt heads with rivet transfers.

 

Mike.

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On 16/03/2024 at 09:30, Enterprisingwestern said:

you can tell by the presence of the step underneath the number

 

Yes, I can see that now. I think I was fooled by an optical illusion, an apparent 'step' at the base of the yellow dot, which is just where the panel is kept cleaner, around the letters and numbers. Indeed, looking at pictures of the real thing it looks as if the shape of spurious panel is intended to 'represent' this feature, which seems to persist even when vans were subsequently in Departmental service  - e.g. p25 of Gamble's British Railway Vans v2 in the Cheona series

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3 hours ago, phil_sutters said:

I believe that Red Panda are now owned by Phoenix Precision Paints.

I bought a Red Panda wagon from the H&A stand at a show about 12 months ago so hopefully they are still be available as I need another chassis for a conversion job. 

 

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