Wolseley

I suppose it's a bit late to be mentioning this but, back in 1975 in London, at one end of a passageway connecting an Underground station with a BR terminal, there were a couple of disused ticket windows with a sign "LNER Tickets" above each of them. It was probably Kings Cross, but at this distance in time, I'm not 100% sure.

It happened to me once, in 1991. At the time I drove a 1990 Mitsubishi Magna, registration PZH 537 (I subsequently changed the registration number after someone stole the plates, but that's another story). I was driving down the Pacific Highway one day and stopped at Killara for something or other. I had parked in front of another Magna and, when I got out of my car, I noticed that the other car's registration was PZH 536.

And, as we had the Leyland Marina 6, here's one of its direct competitors, the Ford Cortina 6:

Behold the six cylinder Leyland Marina. This is the straight six that made it into production, and not the planned V6.

The Marinas that never were:

I do not know the comparative weights of the E Series and B Series , although a former BMC/Leyland engineer who used to work in product development and testing did mention to me once that the B Series was the heavier of the two. I might have the information somewhere in one of my books, but I'm not sure. There was only one V8 engined Austin 1800 built. Externally it looked much like any other ADO17, but with a 116mm extension of the front mudguards and bonnet. The car was front wheel drive and had hydrolastic suspension, but the engine was mounted north-south. The steering mechanism came from a Ford Falcon. One of BMC's technical engineers is on record as saying that "while the characteristic vibrations from the single plane crankshaft were most pronounced, the Rover V8 provided the vehicle with impressive performance. the light steering efforts at parking speeds were most impressive but under power with the wheels on lock the efforts became excessive. Handling while cornering under full throttle was superb but with part or closed throttle the vehicle exhibited strong understeer on the 4.5 inch narrow wheels fitted and this was unacceptably severe." Apparently the vehicle displayed severe torque steer under acceleration. The engineering report noted that development and manufacturing costs would be significantly higher than for a rear wheel drive car - and that was the end of that.

Yes, they are and, if you approach them slowly, you can usually get quite close. They usually seem to travel in pairs. The most of them I have seen in the garden at any one time is eight. There are a few other types of parrots you see around here, the other ones we see a lot of are the sulphur crested cockatoos. They don't come and stop in our garden that often, as they seem to prefer the taller trees in neighbouring properties. They do, however, fly over the house quite a lot, sometimes in flocks of 40 or more, screeching their heads off:

Which is why Leyland Australia were developing the V6. Being based on the P76 V8 (which was basically a 4.4 litre version of the Rover V8), the Marina V6 was an alloy engine and was very light - lighter than the 4 cylinder E Series in fact, which would have made the Marina Six a much better balanced car and markedly improved its handling. Australian four cylinder Marinas actually handled better than UK built cars, due to the use of the E Series instead of the old heavy B Series engines. Because the 4 cylinder E Series was originally designed for East-West installation, the Australian engineers designed a new bell housing before mating it with either a Triumph manual gearbox or a locally made Borg Warner automatic. The V6 was to have been 3310cc. The prototype engine was running on a dynamometer in October 1974 and, when it became obvious that Leyland had no future as a manufacturer in Australia, the prototype engine was sent to Rover in Coventry, as Land Rover had shown an interest in it. Had things been different and the V6 went into production, it would have also replaced the in-line six in the six cylinder P76. Australian Marinas, incidentally, were shipped in CKD form to South Africa, for assembly there. And did you know that BMC Australia had earlier built a V8 version of the Austin 1800? The experience from that was partly why they built the P76 as a rear wheel drive car.....

And Leyland Australia used some dreadful puns for the names of their colours in the early 1970s - the colour of that Marina was listed as "Home on th'Orange".

These are amongst the more frequent visitors to our garden:

With the talk about Morris Marinas earlier in this page, I thought I might mention the Australian Marinas. They were only sold in saloon and coupe form and, although they were originally pretty much the same as the UK built cars, after a short period they were marketed as Leyland (and not Morris) Marinas, with a different grille and the option of the four cylinder E-Series engine in 1500cc, 1750cc and 1750cc twin carburettor form or the 2600 cc E-series six-cylinder engine. A V6 version was being developed at the time of Leyland's demise as an Australian manufacturer - the engine was a shortened version of the Leyland P76 V8 and was lighter than the E Series, which would have improved handling, but it came too late to make it into production. There was also talk of limited production of a V8 Marina, to take on the V8 Holden Toranas at Bathurst - now that could have been interesting..... Here are some photos I took of a Leyland Marina Six at a car show last year:

I too have recently started "playing with Hornby Dublo 3 rail". The excuse I am using is that it entertains my 16 month old grandson when he comes over to our house. I have a growing collection of locomotives, rolling stock and track but, for the moment at any rate, it just comes out now and again and gets laid out on the dining room table. Maybe something more permanent will appear soon.

Hello. Yes, somehow I have a feeling that four is only a start, although I am not aiming at collecting all possible variants. The one thing that always used to bother me with models like the Dublo N2, in decades gone by when I used to be concerned with prototypical accuracy, was the lack of daylight under the boiler (in the case of the N2, the area between the rear of the smokebox and the front of the sidetanks). I can't say it bothers me now though.....

BMC were pretty good at mixing up parts when there was a model changeover. I have a 1962 Wolseley 15/60 (and before you say I must have the date wrong, it's an Australian built car, and they kept building them here until February of 1962 when the 15/60 was replaced by a six-cylinder version of the car, called the 24/80 - 2.4 litres. 80 BHP if you're wondering). Mine is one of the last 15/60s built - the 49th built in 1962 and the highest body number known to the Wolseley Car Club of NSW. It has a 24/80 heater (it was bigger than the 15/60 one and the outlets are different) and the rear spring assembly is 24/80 and not 15/60. There are a few other bits that might be 24/80 as well, but I haven't compared everything.

There appears to be something about the N2 - the locomotive equivalent of being cute and cuddly perhaps? I've been gathering together a small collection of Dublo 3 rail over the last few months, starting with a Bristol Castle, followed by a 2-6-4 tank, Duchess of Montrose, a Sir Nigel Gresley in LNER Blue and, lastly, a rather sad looking Duchess of Atholl that was described as a "non-runner" but was running quite nicely after a bit of fiddling about. And N2 tanks? Somehow I managed to end up with four of them....