This is a 1999 edition of the Beatties catalogue. It scares me that this makes it 20 years old this year. I mean, I'd really have been too old to read it when it came out. How did that happen?
Anyway, by this point, Beatties had a website you could place orders on, reasonably advanced for its time. If that new-fangled Internet wasn't your bag, orders could also be placed by 'phone or fax. It scares me that fax machines also sound like something out of the ark.
You get an idea of just how general a store they were from this page. An LGB train set for £149 as well as polystyrene chuck gliders for £3.50 to £6.99. I notice these are posed with small children to both indicate the target market and make them look bigger.
Interesting that the HST set does not come with the tunnel. I'm pretty sure the one shown is a Noch model, but if you have a genuine Hornby version, this is worth hanging on to as I understand the mould no longer exists.
"Smokey Joe" is of course present. Price £19.99, the same basic model but with modernised mechanism will set you back £34.99 at full RRP. You also see the model in a train set as well as a set with GWR 101. Some things never change!
At the back of the catalogue, there is a sign of things to come. 4 pages of video games, the very products that killed Beatties as they couldn't compete with established names.
On the inside front cover, 60 stores are listed. It's salutary to realise that once the town of Banbury could boast two model shops. Now it has none.
There's a lot of people in the model world who really miss Beatties and Modelzone. We have lost something with their passing and I doubt we'll ever see their like again.
I have fond memories of the Beatties in Leeds, although my abiding memory was the stairs. If my memory is correct (and it's probably 25 years since I was in the shop so someone might correct me) the railway stuff was upstairs, but the stairs were very steep and very narrow, and had a turn half way up making it difficult to know if you'd get all the way up without meeting someone coming the other way. Was well worth getting up there though, even when my pocket money didn't stretch far enough for me to buy anything, just gazing into the cabinets and at the rows of Hornby boxes was reward enough for climbing the stairs!
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