Worst. Kit. Ever.

Nowadays modellers really are spoiled by the choice and quality of the kits available to them. Professional resin casting is reaching ever-higher standards and when done right even DIY casting can produce high-quality results. Here however I present an interesting example from the other end of the scale...

My eBay saved search for bus kits mostly seems to return either ancient whitemetal kits that sellers believe to automatically be valuable because of their age or fairly recent resins going for utterly ridiculous amounts that far exceed their new prices, but something interesting suddenly popped up one day - not only was I not aware of the model's existence, it was made by a manufacturer I had never heard of either. A surprising lack of interest allowed me to secure it for the starting bid, so here it is for your delectation.

Don't be fooled by the attractive packaging - this is definitely the model's best feature!

Are Facebook missing a trick?

A tech-related post this time - there's no vehicular content here. What started out as an idle 'I wish they would do that' thought developed into a realisation that Facebook may be missing out on a vast untapped stream of data, which given their insatiable appetite for knowing everything about everyone surprises me.

What happens when a friend request is rejected or declined? In short, nothing - the requester is not notified and the request is even removed from their activity log leaving no evidence that it ever happened, which inevitably causes confusion as they think maybe they didn't send the request after all and send it again so the other person gets annoyed by having to reject it again. Anyway, that's not really my point. I don't know about others but I only send friend requests to people I have actually met and I think have a high likelihood of accepting. The majority do but on the odd occasions when someone decides not to I would quite like to receive some feedback on why they did so - is it because they don't like the content of my profile, they just don't feel they know me well enough, or something else? If I don't know what's wrong, there's nothing I can do that might make them more likely to accept, but it feels quite rude messaging someone who has just rejected my friend request asking why they did it.

Having thought about this from a purely personal point of view, I then realised that collecting this information would surely give Facebook themselves a massively valuable insight into the psychology of their users and the type of people they might want to be friends with. As a simple example, let's say person X tends to reject requests from users with certain characteristics because he doesn't like the content of their timelines, but accepts requests from users with other characteristics. Knowing this would allow Facebook to provide much better focusing in person X's 'people you may know' list with a consequently greater chance that he will become friends with them and Facebook can do their 'your friends like this so you might too' marketing wizardry. Maybe they could even use this information to help build up statistical data on the probability of any given friend request being rejected and the likely reason why!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't something like this exist a few years ago? After declining a friend request I'm sure you had to select an option, which I think may have been along the lines of 'do you know this person?' and selecting 'no' may have had certain consequences for the requester. Like so many Facebook features, this quietly disappeared just as suddenly as it appeared with no explanation, but expanding it into a list of reasons for declining would have provided useful feedback, both for the requester and more importantly for Facebook themselves.

Any thoughts, or is it just me who wants to know why my friend requests get rejected?

A fairground favourite

My home town's annual Charter Fair is always a highlight of the year for me - two consecutive weekends when, by ancient Royal Charter, the town centre is taken over by funfair rides and attractions, together with the lorries that transport them of course. Think of British fairground transport and you'll almost certainly think of ERF.

In 1999 the B-series ERF was still fairly common on the fairs.

Ever since I started photographing the fair way back in 1998, one particular lorry has attended every single year and has become a firm favourite that I am always delighted to see. Registered JKY 452W, she is a B-series ERF built in 1980 and fitted with the fantastic-sounding 240bhp Gardner 8LXB straight-eight engine, and has been owned for many years by the Forest family, who I believe are based in Oxfordshire; having belonged to the late Malcolm Forest, she is now in the hands of his sons Mark and Gary. A classic showman's drawbar unit with a box body and generator, the double-drive rear bogie apparently predates the lorry itself, having been transplanted from an even older A-series.

At the most recent fair I was told by her proud owners that they have a repaint planned for the winter months and there is no intention whatsoever to retire her from service. As the once-common B-series gets ever rarer on the fairs, here's hoping this fine survivor continues for many more reliable years!

Same lorry, same place, 15 years on and still looking just as smart.

Just listen to that sweet straight-eight Gardner...

Bigger Borismaster

...or 'Two Wrights definitely make a wrong'

Model bus collectors can't have failed to notice that the recently-introduced Borismaster (or New Bus for London, or New Routemaster, or Wrightbus NBFL, or whatever you prefer to call these things) in Corgi Toys' 'Best of British' series has proved something of a revelation and is flying off the shelves, especially into the hands of fleet operators who are often buying large batches. Even I, a staunch non-London fan with a dislike of the real thing, succumbed to the temptation of my usual supplier offering one for just £8.

A fairly pleasant looking little model of a rather ugly bus.

However, I must admit that the very existence of this model confuses me so the point of this post is to express my puzzlement. No one can blame Corgi for wanting a piece of the lucrative London tourist market, but the way they have gone about it seems rather peculiar. An exact 1/76 scale model of the Borismaster already exists in the Original Omnibus Company range, sold as a highly-detailed collectors' model at prices around £30 to £40. Logically, producing a simplified version of this, lacking the fine details such as etched mirrors and wipers, would have been a golden opportunity to generate more sales from an existing casting, given that tooling up a diecast model can reputedly cost a five- or six-figure sum and is not a decision made lightly, and this was the assumption made when it was first announced in 2013.

Indications that all was not straightforward started to appear when Corgi refused to quote an exact scale, instead stating the Best of British series were all made to fit a standard box but quoting a box size that would be appropriate for a 1/76 bus and fuelling much speculation. After a long delay, the model was eventually released in late 2014 and at first glance looked like it was indeed a simplified OOC casting. However, a side-by-side comparison proves that it is indeed an entirely new casting that is fractionally larger; it is said to be 1/75 scale and around 2% oversize for 1/76 but a 2% difference is probably within manufacturing tolerance for most officially 1/76 models anyway. It certainly doesn't look out of place with 1/76 buses, nor even alongside the OOC Borismaster, as the size difference really isn't noticeable.

All this frankly has left me scratching my head and wondering just what the point of the whole exercise was as it basically wasted a large sum of money duplicating tooling that already existed - money that could have been better spent on models of other bus types. I suspect the reason is down to internal politics at Corgi that don't allow the Corgi Toys division to share tooling with OOC, a perceived devaluing of the OOC brand, or some such nonsense, but it would be very much appreciated if someone from Corgi could provide an official explanation of this strange development.

As it stands, I can now see no point whatsoever in buying the OOC model so I predict warehouses full of unsold examples being heavily discounted. The OOC is around four times the price of the almost identically-sized 'toy' but nowhere near four times as good, and it should easily be possible to purchase aftermarket details such as wipers and mirrors that will bring the cheap one up to the same standard for a fraction of the price. After all, if you went to the model shop with £40 and found that would get you one OOC or four of these outwardly identical models, which would you choose? The answer is obvious really...

If you don't believe me, look at the photos and judge for yourself. Thanks go to David Waterton for the loan of the OOC model.

No apparent size difference here.

The toy is a couple of millimetres longer but this is hidden by the curvature of the front and rear ends.

The roof looks a lot wider but this is an optical illusion as the white area is much bigger.

The shapes of the back window prove they are different castings.

Bringing the Albany out of obscurity

So you think you know about cars? Answer me this then...what is a Vauxhall Albany?


Never heard of it? I can't say I'm surprised as it seems to have been almost totally forgotten and by publishing this post I have doubled the amount of material about it available on the internet! The only other page I can find is on the excellent Vauxpedia, a first-stop resource for all things Vauxhall.

Vauxhall publicity photo of the elusive Albany. No one ever seems to have photographed one on the road!

So what was the Albany and why has it been consigned to the scrapyard of automotive history?

In short it was Vauxhall's first MPV, but also basically a Bedford Midi van with windows. Although the Midi was already well established in minibus form, these were utilitarian vehicles aimed squarely at the commercial market, and the success of the likes of the Renault Espace prompted Vauxhall to produce a far more upmarket car-like seven-seater.

The Bedford Midi. Fine as a van but did it ever stand a chance in the MPV market?

The Albany was launched at the 1990 British Motor Show and featured an impressive list of standard equipment that was certainly a cut above the basic Midi, including tinted glass, twin sunroofs, reclining seats, separate rear heating and power steering. Sadly, all of these luxuries couldn't disguise the fact it was very obviously based not only on a van, but a van that was starting to show its age against the competition. Only one brochure was ever issued for the Albany, which pictured the vehicle in various aspirational 'lifestyle' settings where it was horribly out of place but seemed to aim it primarily at business customers such as hotels and corporate shuttle services rather than private buyers.

The Albany brochure promoting its lifestyle credentials. The glider would probably be a more pleasant mode of transport.

The upshot of all this was that the Albany flopped. The range never expanded beyond a single model available in just two colours (the Bordeaux Red and Westminster Blue illustrated above) and propelled by a crude and underpowered 2-litre petrol engine. Perhaps more significantly than the vehicle's own failings though, the market for luxury van-derived MPVs we see today exemplified by the Ford Tourneo and Mercedes Viano just didn't exist 25 years ago and cars such as the Espace were aimed very much at the small niche of providing fairly basic transport for large families without portraying a prestige image, so the Albany's 'executive' credentials were somewhat misplaced. Only 300 were officially sold before it was quietly dropped just over a year after launch, and around half of those are said to have actually been registered either by dealers or by Vauxhall themselves in a desperate attempt to improve the dire sales figures. Vauxhall's next attempt at an MPV, the American-built Sintra, met with little more success but it was third time lucky with the innovative Zafira.


I actually have some recollection of seeing an Albany in real life. A large family in the village where I went to primary school had a red one - this was the early nineties so they probably bought it new. Even in my very young mind I knew it was basically a van and vastly inferior to the Mitsubishi Space Wagon my parents had at the time. Today there are apparently only two left on the road and the model has disappeared into almost total obscurity - has anyone actually seen one?

So there you have it, my own little tribute to a tiny, insignificant and forgotten part of automotive history.

Welcome

As you've probably guessed this is the first post on a brand new blog written by someone with no previous blogging experience. So who am I and what do I hope to achieve here?

Born, raised and still happily living in Buckinghamshire, England, I am an IT professional by trade with a particular interest in databases. My real passion however lies in transport, but I'm neither an anoraky trainspotter nor a Top Gear fanboy type (although I confess to a certain admiration for the work of Mr May). Trains, planes and boats leave me cold, as do the majority of dull generic modern cars, and what excites me are everyday cars of the seventies, eighties and nineties, buses and coaches (although interest here is waning thanks to legislation and corporate blandness gradually eliminating what little variety remains), and old lorries, especially those used by showmen and circuses with their own special charm.

I intend this blog to be somewhere I can express whatever random thoughts and recollections may be running through my head so who knows what may appear here, although the majority of content is likely to be transport or IT-related. I hope there is someone out there who will enjoy my ramblings!