S is for Scammells, Scarabs, Scammell Arabs and Mechanical Horses!

Mentioned in a comment by Jon a few days ago, I had half these in the queue, and quickly took a couple of scans to complete the post! The Mechanical Horse from Scammell, introduced in 1934, was a tree-wheeled lorry (truck) designed for 'short-haul' delivery around a station's goods depot, within the usually adjacent industrial estate, or the wider town, with narrow ways and limited movement a priority, or for moving goods around the busy yard of one of those industrial premises.

 

The 1948 upgrade was known as a Scammell Arab (the best [mechanical] horse!), quickly shortened to Scarab (because it looks more like a beetle that an Arab stallion?!!), which in turn became shorthand for all version of the three-wheelers!

This was the best version for many years, a ready-made model, with flatbed trailer and load - an early model of shipping container, from Merit (J&L Randall), this was actually in one of the older show-report posts, which, as it's all back in 2021 now and beyond relevant as an 'H is for...' type post, I will cannibalise to get a few posts out of it, for the targets!

 

The four main components, Merit also offered most other combinations, with three seperate kits of the lorry, trailer and container, or similar ready-made combinations. Although I think the kits were in the same oxide-red plastic?

 

This colour-scheme is known as Blood and Custard, and represents the British Rail road transport fleet of my early childhood before the all-yellow's of Red Star, NCL and suchlike, and you can see how having such a curved 'prow' meant the vehicles could enjoy tighter turning circles.

 

Langley, who we looked at earlier today, do both the Mechanical Horse (top right) and the Scarab, bottom left, with at least three configurations currently on their website, and various compatible trailers.

 

Airfix offered this for a short while, before dropping it from the catalogues for years, only for it to reappear as a Dapol item, after some Philistines at General Mills, Palitoy or Heller offloaded chunks of the mould bank, where it had mouldered for all those years!

 

Dapol 5th Edition catalogue shot.

 

As Dapol only added it to later catalogues (it's still available), it seems it either needed work, or took a while to find among the other tooling?

This Peco advert' used to be on the back of a lot of model railway magazines and shows Merit accessories with the Peco LK codes, the Scarab is for illustrative purposes, it's not included in the set, and I don't think it was ever offered by Peco with an LK code? I think the missing word is 'essential'?

 

I then found three scans of the box in the 'everything Merit' folder down the bottom of Picasa, where they've been sitting patiently since November 2021!

 

And in another Peco advert as a Merit-coded model.