Whisky or military in N…

From humble beginnings. Hornby has a model of this wagon in their range in the distinctive red and grey livery and as a child I always fancied one to go with my Hornby VDA. Today’s OO example by Bachmann greatly surpasses that of my childhood, as did the previous Parkside kit. In N we’re lucky to now have the truly wonderful Sonic models example…

The prototype were a quick fix to retain Ministry of Defence traffic when BR was adopting air brakes as standard for the newly created ‘higher speed’ Speedlink network. The newer vans were too long for many MoD sites, whose tight curvature limited the use of the modern examples. 50 Vanwides were modified with Fat-19 friction link suspension and roller bearings and coded VEA.

The Sonic models vans are beautifully moulded with fine detail and superb chassis. They respond well to subtle weathering, each product is slightly different to the others of the same colour, I’ve got a pair of maroon ones that have different markings as well as number.

Only these first 50 were painted in Freight maroon, which in service was found to fade quickly to the usual freight brown colour. The rest of the fleet, a further 500, carried the red and grey livery. Only a handful ever carried the later Railfreight Distribution dark grey and yellow livery before Speedlink was abandoned in 1991 and the MOD began transitioning to containers for inter site transfers.

Fitted with DG couplings you’d be hard pressed to scale these lovely models, just less than £20 seems a real bargain.

On Paxton Road I’ve got a trio of these now, but they’ve run with only basic weathering until recently. They’ve now had the ‘usual’ treatment to breath some life into them, although I’m almost tempted to pick up a fourth example and really attempt a fade on the maroon paintwork. There not really prototypical for my small layout, almost exclusively used in MoD traffic, although I do think they may have seen brief service in Whisky in Scotland in the late 1970s, I’ve photos of them on the Dufftown branch. Perhaps these arrived (when in Scottish setting) for loading from a smaller distillery that isn’t rail served?

Until next time, more soon…

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