T is for Turds; Liqui-turds!

Sorry - but while a few of these are for water or wine, the majority of them are liquid manure, sewage or slurry tankers, and I felt 'T is for Tankers' appearing in people's feeds might get war-gamers thinking I was about to look at the AFV crew sets (ably dealt-with on PSR) . . . I'm not; today I'are be mostley looking at . . . mookey-poo tankers!

I believe the upper shot shows a Roskopf wagon, while the lower two are clearly Preiser, but as we shall see in a day or two, it's not that simple, and they are probably the same wagon, one by Roskopf over-painted crudely by the owner (milk? Or snow!) and equipped with simpler sculpts of horse a very 1950's 'kit figure' riding the wagon; the other given better draft animals and a hand-brake leaver after Preiser obtained it (?), along with a more realistically-sculpted walking handler.

As a kid I saw these all over Europe (and I presume there are still a fair few around?), water carts which can be taken-out to the field and used to fill the stand-alone troughs there. The painter was probably correct to assume milk could be collected in similar vessels?

From the current catalogue - the grape-tubs are just sat in a standard tractor trailer (not tractor/trailer which is a different thing altogether, although 'Rubber-duck' would probably appreciate a few hundred gallons of wine in his cab "10-4 cum'mon, hic!") while the other three are for liqi-turd!

I like that Preiser have moved the tractor-towed tanker to the back of the wagon to make it look a little different from the horse-drawn one -in case you have them both on the same layout? While the modern one looks a little too like a milk/water tanker, not a mistake you'd want to make if you were thirsty!

I once worked for a company dealing in slurry tankers, and people used to send the pumps back when they got blocked (usually a bent or jammed vane, or a stone fallen in the slurry) which had to be unblocked from a floor-bolt mounted cradle pointing out of a side -door of the warehouse, as when they were freed, they shot out the last thing they'd been pumping, a few days older, with force . . . euwww!

I got so sick of always photographing this one with the attendant upside-down, walking the wrong way or under the horses hooves, I prised a staple open carefully and shot it for this post - all back together now!

It's basically the cradle for the box-wagon we'll look at in another post, with a [plastic] steel tank dropped between the uprights. From the pre-Mauritian paint-shop days, it's not up to later standards and the glue has been rather thrown around under the barrel. Also it's one of a few with a twin-species draft-team!

Perhaps I was a little sensationalist in my titling of the thread as we look at four more non-sewage carriers from the catalogue, but like mose men; I'm only a taller, older child and getting 'turd' into the title was too tempting an opportunity to resist!

The grape tubs are just dropped into the recent re-sculpt of the old ladder-sided wagon (rack-wagon), the rest of the fire appliances will be looked at in a later post, as will the modern, pneumatic-tyred, plastic-tank, which probably can be used for liquid poop as well as water.

That last one is actually exactly the sort of equipment modern armies take to war to get water to troops hidden in woods, up mountains or out in the desert, so for war gaming, a quick military paint job could make it a useful addition to the logistics inventory.

On the right is a Picasa-clearing scan of the tanker seen above, while to the left is a catalogue 'suggestion for arrangement' of the grape harvest trailer.

On the farm I would use a very similar machine to that being used by the chap on the left, known to me as a cider-chopper or apple chopper, it will cut most things and is a simple, hand-turned, bladed shaft or roller at the bottom of a wooden hopper, which chops/crushes or mashes-up the grapes so that you can get the maximum into the barrel, if you tipped the grapes straight into the barrel, a few at the bottom would get a bit squished by the weight of those above, but there would be a lot of air in there, like a ball-pit at a kids restaurant!

An unpainted version of the poop-mobile (see what I did there - hey, I'm an atheist, it's just funny!*) is available in Set 16345, while the guy walking next to my blister-carded version is from the lower set, removed from the catalogue now, I think one of the Tyrolean sets around the numbers 190-230, but I can't be sure with the catalogues in storage, the alpine-horn guy also came in a set of three at the same place in the catalogue I think?

* For foreign visitors to the blog: The British tabloids dubbed the Pope's various open-topped bullet-proof carriers 'Pope-mobiles' around the early 1980's - didn't stop one getting shot though, did it? Message from his God - no doubt! If you don't put blind faith in a deity to be responsible for you being shot or being not-shot, any subsequent shooting of the self is down to the actions (or inactions) of the self . . . what's known as self-determination!