CC In Scale: Anomaly Street – Buses, Trams, Trucks & More

There’s a street in the industrial area of the city near me called Anomaly Street. Strange, because as far as I can see it’s a perfectly normal street for an industrial area. Warehouses, factories, sheds, yards, and even the odd vacant block that’s still scrubby trees and dry grass. But that’s a handy title for today’s past, a catch-all of things that are outliers, oddities, and anomalies among my models. It’s also a cool way to start the new year.

Now many guys may have built ships, planes or tanks. Not me. Absolutely nothing against military subjects, they just have no appeal for me. Almost everything is road transport. So let’s take a brief look at the industrial side of my collection.

Neoplan Cityliner Coach

A beautiful kit, which Revell’s German arm offered briefly from 2008. Although a huge model (510mm long!) and beautifully detailed, it was not a problem to build. The hardest part was applying all those upholstery pattern decals to the seats. And the little ‘Neoplan’ decal on each individual seat frame. It came with decals for the side panels to replicate the original ‘concept’ coach, but I elected to leave those off. After the seats. I’d had enough!

London Bus

Also from Revell of Germany, but a much more popular (and expensive) subject. This came with a choice of engines; the original AEC diesel or a modern Euro-compliant Scania, as well as a choice of several period advertisement schemes or plain panels. I bought the Haynes restoration manual for help in detailing this kit.

Bedford Tip Truck

The O series Bedford is an early postwar British truck that used to be everywhere during my childhood. An Emhar kit (a company no longer around), they offered long and short wheelbase Bedfords with flatbed (LWB), tanker (LWB), tipper (SWB) and tow truck (SWB) bodies. Great kits, with a really well detailed chassis. Very popular with British truck modelers, but I guess there weren’t enough of them to save the company. I’m currently building up the tow truck.

Autocar Dump Truck

This one’s an AMT truck from the 1960s that gets reissued from time to time. I did this one about twenty years back.

Volvo lowloader with Cat Dozer.

The Volvo N10 is an ERTL kit from about 1980. ERTL had made models of Internationals for about ten years or so; it was quite surprising for them to do a new Volvo. The Cat D9 is another one of those AMT kits that keeps reappearing, as is the rather simple Lowboy trailer it’s sitting on. The photo was taken on the bank of our duckpond about 20 years ago.

Kenworth T600

Another older build. I read at the time that this was basically a new cab on an old chassis, but I don’t know enough about real trucks to confirm that. Opening sleeper door was a nice touch, so I made up the bed using a leftover scrap from my wife’s fabric box.

Cable car

A model from long-defunct Hawk plastics, in 1/48 scale, last available in 1967. Cars like this (we called them trams) ran in Melbourne prior to 1940, so I painted this in thirties MMTB chocolate and cream livery, but didn’t attempt the markings. Recently I discovered the cable trams used different route-specific colour schemes – oh well…!

1804 (Trevithick) Locomotive

I love old machinery. Usually, you can see what everything does, but this one stretches the brain cells a bit. It’s an old 1/32 scale model of the 1804 Trevithick Penydarren steam locomotive from Airfix, last available in 2012. A steam engine with just enough machinery attached to make it mobile.

Beam engine

Another 1960s Airfix kit, this represents the type of steam engine used in heavy industries or for pumping out mines. This one is not specifically ascribed to a particular maker; it might be a Watt, a Newcomen, or something else entirely.

TARDIS

Airfix again. This 1/12 scale TARDIS from the British TV series Doctor Who comes with figures of the Doctor and Martha. Although the door opens, the interior is disappointingly normal-sized, not larger than the outside as viewers know it should be! It does however have an operating flashing light on the roof and make the appropriate TARDIS sound.

That’s it for this time.

Normal service will resume next fortnight with – something or other. We might take the TARDIS back to, say, 1969 maybe? See you then.