Beattie OO Van from Graham Farish

It seems that heritage models are popular at the moment, or at least Matt Scruton thought it was worth saying he was enjoying them, so because of him, you are getting this as Friday's posting.

Actually, this fits in very nicely on this blog. Regular readers will know that I've already celebrated the Beatties plastic carrier bag, only to be topped by a friends 1975 version.

Well, Beatties didn't just produce bags, they sold stuff to go in them too. Here we have a limited edition railway van that ticks every collectible box imaginable. It's a limited edition (sort of) and in it's packaging, probably unused. Best of all, despite being firmly OO gauge or 4mm scale, the model was produced by none other than Graham Farish.

Better know nowadays for their N gauge products, they are now part of the great Bachmann empire. In those far off days of my youth, they produced a pretty good OO scale range too. I know that most of my early wagons came from their factory. At the time I think they looked a lot better than the contemporary Hornby or Lima offerings. The wheels were certainly a lot finner than the silver-seal Hornby ones.

I can't claim to know much about the range but a little digging shows that both a Black 5 and 94xx tank were in the range. I can't recall those but have seen plenty of the wagons, often mint in box. Were I feeling a little flusher, a small collection would look nice on the shelf. They might even make half-decent finescale models unless someone with more prototype knowledge would like to to disabuse me of this fancy.