Here's a photo of my grandfather's Thames, taken after he'd sold his business to well known ship, truck and bus operator MacBraynes in 1964. Sadly I don't have a photo of it in his colours, but I gather it was grey, with the area bounded by the 'swoopy' trim being maroon. The absence of this trim on the Lesney model is the main reason I haven't been brave enough to make a custom painted 70a yet as I don't think my chances of doing it well are very high! I'm not sure if Ford actually produced the Thames with the 'Estate/Minibus' bodywork or whether they were all vans converted by other companies which may account for the different trim. This one was by a firm called Kenex, and another called Martin Walter seems to have been responsible for many of them. Similar minibuses started to get popular in the late 1950s/early 1960s mostly Ford Thames, Bedford CA and Austin/Morris J2s although I've seen a few Trojans and Standard Atlases too. There doesn't seem to have been a clear market leader until Ford brought out the Transit, a vehicle which still holds that position today.
Quite why Lesney called it the 'Estate Car' I don't know and it seems to be responsible for more misunderstandings, particularly of a transatlantic nature, than any other model. To my eyes it can only be a minibus, an estate car being something like the 38b Vauxhall Victor, and a van in the UK does not have rear windows unless it's a camper van. I know that in the early 1950s Bedford and maybe others made an 'estate bus' which was basically a development of the 'shooting brake' type of concept. The Thames in the picture was mostly used on school runs, where incidentally, the vehicle it replaced was an aging Ford V8 Shooting Brake (that's a Woody in the US). Have I clarified anything - probably not
