Having looked at Presflos and Cemflos, TIM SHACKLETON turns to Blue Circle’s present-day fleet of PCAs, now operated by Freightliner in partnership with Lafarge.
I WAS PLEASED BY THE RECEPTION THAT Hornby Magazine readers gave my feature on weathering Accurascale’s exquisite Cemflo wagons in HM146, which followed on from an earlier piece on Blue Circle Presflos in HM104. The article triggered a fair number of enquiries and even a couple of private commissions so your editor and I, knowing how the market works, decided that what the world obviously wanted was more of the same.
Although only one of my wagons would carry any branding, the Blue Circle fleet (taken over by Lafarge in 2001 and subsequently outsourced to Freightliner) offered more opportunity than any other operator.
After finishing the 1960s-era Cemflos I’d moved on to a train of ‘modern-era’ cement wagons based around vee-tanks and ‘Metalair’ PCAs. At this point Accurascale released the French-built PCA 51ton cement tank in ‘OO’ to be followed by the Realtrack Models version in ‘N’ They are only available commercially in the liveries of Rugby Cement, STS and Castle Cement, but they can be reworked to represent a Blue Circle wagon.
I was primarily using the exercise,…