Van, Midland Railway (Hornby MLDL)
| Exhibit |
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Van, Midland Railway (Hornby MLDL) |
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| location: |
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Arch Four , Area 37 Hornby Wall (display) |
| Shelf 4 |
A very early grey 1920s "MLDL" Hornby gauge 0 Midland Railway Wagon with a black "type 1" base, white roof, bare metal couplings, and brass buffers.
We can't take this van out of the cabinet to examine it more closely, but the use of brass "Meccano-style" buffers suggests that the van is probably put together with Meccano-style nuts and bolts.
Metal lettering
The large, bold white "MR" lettering is stamped from separate pieces of sheet metal (one piece per letter), with metal tabs that are inserted into matching slots in the van walls, and then folded over.
Since this seems such an extreme method of putting white letters onto the side of a grey van, it seems that at this point, the Meccano Ltd. production line had perhaps not yet quite got to grips with the art of painting lettering onto the sides of their products (for instance, the numbering on the sides of the cabs of the early Hornby trains were stamped into brass plates that were then fixed to the sides of the locomotives, rather than painted).
The Midland Railway disappeared in 1923 with the formation of the LMS (London Midland and Scottish railway).
