F is for Four Tier

Even rack-toys go posh, or 'big bucks', usually around the time of-, or aimed at- the Christmas market, but also intending to cover the birthday and 'well done' -present market which were definite 'things' when I was a kid! Blue box provided their larger three and four tier sets for just such occasions, and I'm lucky-enough to have this one.

I can't now remember if this came from a local evening fair or an early Birmingham show, but I do remember it being cheap, due to two factors, one, the box was (is!) a bit tatty and two, the contents were loose and remain to this day un-guarantee-able as to completeness!

Although this is to a certain extent the fate of all larger sets, they tend to A) encounter more damaging problems over a lifetime; fire, flood, damp, sunlight, knocks and falls, and B) start off by selling in smaller numbers!

If anything is missing from the set it's likely to a few more figures, with two of the kneeling Dinky mechanic copies and one lying on the inspection trolly, there are sevearl poses missing, it's also harder to tell what the contents might have been or where they went as some items were glued in with Hong Kong's answer to ............... which is a darker-brown snot, while other items were held in with rubber-bands over stamped flaps in the floor.

However, what you can see is what was in the set when I bought it, I added nothing and nothing's been taken out. With a pretty constant breakdown of one substantial vehicle, one larger accessory piece and one or two smaller accessories and/or figure/s per tier, it's obvious that it's probably only missing a figure or three?

Obviously - I bought it for the two civilianised Bedford RL's! I also love the artwork of the deeper, top tier, that's got to be the busiest post-war "Garidge in all Lhaanden Town me'chinah", I think there may even be some ship-building going-on behind the taxman's back there! Three mobile-cranes, two tower-cranes and err . . . a conning-tower?

Then there's a mini-bus (at least twenty years before they'd been invented) and two imported US sedans! While the helicopter in the bottom tier seems to have landed outside a Bavarian barrack-town! The camp in Weingarten looked just like that, with fields five-minutes away!

To hold the three different designs of tier in the right place to line-up with their windows, a piece of packing card is placed at the top of the box and while the deeper top tier is now 'independently mobile' it used to be sellotaped to the other three!

Close-ups of the three larger road vehicles; I don't know anything about them; I think one may be an Austin Healey? Which might mean the other is an Austin Sprite, and both Dinky copies (?), but I really don't know, while a red racing car is usually associated with Ferrari, you can run any make in any colour of plastic and it would need a GP/F1 fan to recognise the exhast arrangement or nose shape and say "Yeah, it's a Masterblaster Tart-trap MkIV, with the billy-blowers and overhead ham-cams".

Of more interest is that one is in 1:48th'ish scale and blow-moulded in polyethylene, while the other two are glued styrene models closer to the 1:60th of the Dinky donors, with - elsewhere in the box - HO-gauge compatible trucks, an N-gauge helicopter and forecourt accessories closer to 1:24th (oil-can cabinet)!