The Airfix meat van I did a short while ago has peaked my interest just a smidge. There is a little bit of local interest for this (or a well sketchy excuse for me to go waffling on for a minute or two!).

Meat products moved by rail were probably most famous for the Palethorpes vans that operated out of the Dudley area but Brierley Hill was also famous for another processed meat producer, Marsh and Baxter.  Founder, Alfred Marsh brought a pork butchers shop (with slaughter house) from E.J. Smart on Brierley Hill High Street in 1867 and initially started out curing ham and manufacturing sausages.  By 1912 he brought the A.R Baxter factory in Dale End, Birmingham.  Alfred Marsh died in 1918 and the business passed to his son Alfred Edward Marsh. After WW1 the company continued absorbing smaller firms and was eventually granted a Royal Warrant for its York Hams, which they supplied to Harrods.

In 1927 They began using their own siding at Brierley Hill Station and at their peak employed some 1500 workers and slaughtering approximately 2000 pigs per day. It was quite famous locally for an advert featuring a pig pulling a trailer loaded with sausages and the strap line ‘Drawing his on conclusion’.   In 1954 a modern office building was built on Church Street, Brierley Hill which being slighter higher than the Round Oak steel works did tend to dominate the town somewhat.  They also took a keen interest in investing in and promoting local sports and social interests and had both a cricket and football teams (both mens and womens).

In 1962 the company was brought out by Falstock Marketing Corporation although the Marsh and Baxter name was retained. It would survive another 16 years until December 1978 when the company was closed.

This one is a Diagram 1/250 example using Airfix ends kindly supplied by my friend Ian.  Knowing what I know now it would have been better to use a parkside standard 12t van as the meat van has different doors.  Luckily I still had some suitable doors in my spares box.  The ens needed chamfering to 45 degrees to match the ends and the floor needed shortening a little as the Airfix ends are thicker. I also used some spare underframe mouldings to get the BR welded plate fronted axle boxes.

On the subject of vans I quite like these ex GWR mink Gs.  Another Parkside kit with Bill Bedford springing and some other etched bits and bobs to refine the underframe a little.

Moving on to Parkside’s latest effort. The BR 13t hopper. You can feel the Peco in this one!  The underframe has similar feel (both in the way it’s done and the plastic its done in) to the old wonderful wagons tank kits. I needed to get the scalpel out to get it to fit together the way it was intended but once done it does result in a pretty solid chassis.  I don’t know what happened with the supplied axleboxes but they seemed unfinished to me, almost as if there should have been an overlay as per the palvan kit.  As there wasn’t I cut them off completely and replaced them with Wizard Models castings.

The body isn’t the best fit to the chassis either and the ends needed trimming to fit. Peco supply wire and a bit of plastic rod for the handrails and underframe but its all a bit overscale so I used 0.6mm brass wire on the underframe and 0.3mm nickel silver for the handrails.  Speaking of which theres no way you are going to get the required long handrail into the plastic brackets on the end uprights without breaking them so its easier to snip them open and pop the wire in that way than to try. Knowing what to look out for it does build into a nice looking wagon and its pretty quick to bung one together.  The model features some nice moulding on both sides of the hopper doors but with no where to really put any decent amount of weight I suspect many (like i will) will run them loaded.

The inevitable comparison with my previous model from the Dave Bradwell kit. Draw your own conclusions.