The Little World

My childhood was punctuated at very short intervals by the arrival of Bekins, Allied, or Mayflower moving vans…and we whisked off to another portion of North America. Eventually we whisked off to Australia, and as the airline that brought us here went out of business, we stayed. I am happy to say that the moves around Perth have been few and mostly accomplished by home haulage.

My campaign to model my own experiences therefore needs some record of the business of removal. My scale of choice – 1:18th – is not encouraging in this. There seem to be very few vehicles that might be considered to be moving vans available. Even the next step down to 1:24th would yield very few candidates. It is only when you get down to 1:35 and the First Gear models that you get a variety of movers.

This means that the lateral thinking and scratchbuilding may be needed. All I need is the right toy truck cab from some plastic maker and a set of trailer wheels and I can devise the rest. I live in hope and haunt the toyshops looking for that cab. I have long given up the hope of a 50’s/60’s prototype as these just do not appeal to the child of today, but I am prepared to modify and paint whatever I can see with the classic Bekins or Allied orange or the Mayflower green and yellow. It is times like this that the idea of 1:64th or 1:43rd seems so attractive – the builders have long made utilitarian models as well as sporting vehicles. But they are so small…

The other problem is going to be the fact that moving vans are hollow…and you have to make a whole houseful of furniture to fill them. We had sofas, chairs, tables, beds, a piano, tea chests full of crockery and lamps, and innumerable round cardboard barrels full of everything else…and we seemed to take it every damned time we moved. I can see about half the build time will be given over to the furnishings.

Of course, after a few years of scale model moving most of that little furniture would be broken…but that is accurate modelling as well…