As you all know i have made the decision on an era to model & concentrate on....This being the very late steam & transition period sometime between 1966 & say 1973.
While cleaning out the cupboards of stuff i have accumulated over the years i came across an LLV that is painted in the candy livery. I wasn't sure what to do about this wagon but one thing is for sure it does not fit my chosen era. It is a very well built & painted AR kits offering that i like very much. After much to-ing & fro-ing i have decided to list it on ebay & see it go to a home where it may well be shown & run in a fashion it deserves.
The main reason for this posting is to spark a bit of debate & see if any more history on this wagon comes out of it.
From what i know...there were two LLVs that were treated to this livery & were numbered W2613 & W2615. One train of thought is that this scheme was carried out as a trial & that a positive reaction may well have seen more of the greater wagon fleet adorned as well. If this was the case it would have been a shortlived excercise as history has shown that the loco fleets so treated ended up with variations that saw the initial candy scheme truncated to a plain red ( red terror ) scheme in an obvious austerity measure. In hindsight it is easy to see that the original candy scheme would have been very costly to maintain in both material & labour plus the time taken to initially treat & maintain this livery would have severely hampered the ability to quickly turn around locos following a Dulux service.
There are other less believable rumors that have circulated over the years & while i profess to know very little about the real reason for the conversion I feel that the codes that they ended up with probably give a hint as to more likely reasons.
Mind you in the prototype shots i have seen i cannot make out a code board anyway....so did they ever "wear" these codes
I have only seen a couple of shots of the prototype vans after conversion & am of the belief they may still reside in Cowra.
Hopefully someone more learned who reads this blog may well be able to shed some light on the mystery.
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| The wagon described in model form |
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| Another view... |
Hi Rod,
ReplyDeleteThese wagons sat at the end of Vaux Street Cowra for a long time, I remember seeing them there as a youngster. As far as I can remember these were condemned wagons and were only a test paint. I could be wrong as I am only going via memory but that maybe why there are no code boards.
Andrew
Andrew,
ReplyDeleteThank you for the info... Sounds very plausable... While not suggesting that common sense ever became the norm with the government railways...why recode them even if only an intention.
Could they have been destined to be work train duty...say crane tenders???
Rod
Rod
ReplyDeleteIn some ways you answered the question with the comment regarding the nightmare of the scheme as well as the later Red & White type of Austerity scheme.
I would see the paint scheme as nothing more than a test bed for the public profilled fleet such as locomotives & passenger trains, as the actual side dimensional looks ov the LLV would be a good size to show it off prior to final acceptance. So I would think that what Andrew said is the most likely reason.
I never saw the wagons in real life, but being condemned wagons or in Works use they would have provided a good test bed for the scheme. Some years back, & it may have been in an ARHS Digest mag was an article on the various colours propossed for the loco fleet, with the Belbin colour winning the contest.
I also did both models some time ago for Warren Herbert. I was able to travel to Cowra where they were still evident in the yard although hard to get at. A set of photos are on Keiran Ryan's ARDP site.
ReplyDeleteMacca