Friday, March 05, 2021

Plastic trams

Dad's birthday - and I spotted that the Wythall Transport Museum shop eBay account had some of the Atlas Editions tram models for sale for a fiver each. Well, I couldn't think what to get him, and I rather like the look of them.


I'll confess, I've not carried out any research into these - so they may be horribly inaccurate, but neither of us is bothered, they just look so good. 



To be honest, if the partwork that these hail from re-appeared on the shelves, I suspect we'd sign up for it. We're not into foreign trams really, and don't need any more models, but how can you resist? All the models are HO scale, and moulded in plastic. This wasn't cheap to tool up.



Still, a present bought, and money gone to a good cause. Now, I wonder if we could build a very small transport museum, with a display of trams from around the world...

6 comments:

James Finister said...

The blue tram (Munich?) has an interesting pantograph/trolley. Not least because I've seen that design suggested as an easy approach for beginners wanting to use overhead collection

Mark said...

Of course if you were willing to take them apart (I've found these things are usually screwed together) the question is... would a Kato tram chassis fit and allow you to power them? Not that you need ideas for future blog posts but....

Phil Parker said...

Mark - Ideas along this line are already forming, but I'll come back to that in another post...

Luke Stevens said...

I wish Atlas had sold the Electric locomotive collection in the UK. It had some really interesting stuff, including a class 81 in H0.

Luke

Huw Griffiths said...

Luke,

I take it you know the problem with that:

"For the 87th time today, there's no demand for British outline HO!"

OK - perhaps the demand does exist (some of us would prefer it if RTR model bodyshells and track were modelled to the same scale - preferably the same scale as used in many countries elsewhere) - but a number of manufacturers missed the chance to do something about this in the 50s / 60s / 70s.

Because of this, we are stuck with a dodgy scale / gauge combo that a number of people neither like nor respect.

Of course, this is a personal opinion - with which people are welcome to disagree - although I'm sure that everyone around here would exercise restraint in how any opinions get expressed ... .

Luke Stevens said...

Hi Huw,

The cl81 wouldn't have been a particular interest to me, but there were a lot of other H0 locos which could be background items or powered if not available in r-t-r.

I would say that there was another chance in the late 90's when UK loco models mainly had pancake motors, before Hornby's move to China and Bachmann Branchline released their cl25. The British H0 society (I think) had been arranging with Heljan to do an H0 cl 37 with central motor, cardan shaft drive, the works. But a major purchaser pulled out and Heljan then did the 00 cl47 on their own and the opportunity was lost.

Luke