Going Bananas

Back to model railways today - this is one of my most recent acquisitions:

This is a Triang-Hornby VIX ferry van - I've long wanted one of these, but second hand examples they always seem to be ridiculously priced on eBay, even at model fairs and the like they seem to start at a tenner apiece, often in less than pristine condition.  Anyway, I picked this one up from the local Toy and Train Collectors Fair for five quid - I'd never seen one in this livery before and it turns out that, by Triang-Hornby standards, it is a bit of a rarity.  By pure coincidence, after I'd bought it a video turned up in my YouTube recommendations by a guy who collects these.  It seems that this livery for the ferry van was only produced in 1973 for inclusion in the 'Freightmaster' train set.  It wasn't in the catalogue and couldn't be purchased as a separate item.  Only 15,000 were produced, which, by the standards of the time, made it a limited production run.  Which still seems like a lot, but one has to wonder how many still exist after fifty years?  I also wonder whether the livery is in any way authentic - I somehow doubt it as bananas were transported from the docks in specialised ventless vans at the time.

You might recall from an earlier post all those badly painted secondhand Triang-Hornby coach sides that I was planning to refurbish and use to convert some composite coaches into brake second coaches.  Well, the first of the conversions is complete:

It is still awaiting the addition of transfers for the numbers, but otherwise is finished and ready to roll.  I've three more to convert, (two more brake seconds and a full brake), but the parts for them make the repainting a bit trickier.  A previous owner fitted  them with South Eastern Finecast flush glazing, which improves the appearance, but cemented it in place, making it virtually impossible to temporarily remove.  This means that each individual window would have to be laboriously masked to facilitate respraying, a hugely time consuming task.  Consequently, I'm experimenting with some alternative approaches - I've managed to loosen the glazing strip in one set of sides sufficiently that I can insert a strip of paper between each window and the coach side to form a simple mask.  I'll attempt a respraying of these sides soon.  Watch this space.  (The completed coach was the only one still fitted with its original Triang-Hornby glazing - a strip of thin plastic - which is easily removable, which made it the obvious choice to start the project with).