Merit bus shelter

 

Struggling to find photos of rural bus shelters for a project, I mentioned my plight on MREmag.com. Today's issue is full of people helping me out. 

Plan B had been to find a Wills kit and copy that in the appropriate scale. Nipping in to my local model shop, of course he hasn't got one on the shelf despite there being an example for a long while. I'd looked at it several times and nearly bought for the fun of assembling a nice kit. 

Second best though was the version from Merit. Bought second hand (£2) it's still available today. 

I like the design a lot. It dates from the late 1950s to early 60s when there was real optimism about the future. BR was modernising, investing heavily in new stations, shunting yards and diesel locomotives. Concrete was modern and exciting be it brutalist buildings, or on a smaller scale, bus stops. 

Of course we know how all this turned out. The stations might still exist but years of minimal maintainance and endless tinkering to add retail space has ruined the original clean lines. The shunting yards were made obselete by shipping containers and cheap road transport. Those early diesels turned out to be bad investements in many cases. Brutalism was a look that never won many freinds outside the architectural comunity. Bus stops, well steel ones weather better and anyway, people prefer to drive so there's no need to invest in those that are left. 

I still think it's an under modelled period though.