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74a Mobile Canteen, issued 1959, length 67mm, box types B-C and D.
74b Daimler (Fleetline), issued 1966, length 76mm, box types E and F.







Still looking for the Pink one, come on Greg show it to me again.





The two different front castings.



The two variations of fixing the base plate, one fixed with a spread rivet to the front, the other with a round rivet.



The five base colours the Sea Green being the hardest to find.









Not too many variations on this one 74b model.

Thank you to the well wishers about my hand operation, as you can see it has been a success I think.

George T.

kerbside wrote:Thank you to the well wishers about my hand operation, as you can see it has been a success I think. George T.

Wonderful, It's nice to have you back George.
re: the canteen, You say the sea green is the hardest to find but in my experience it is the very pale blue by 3 to 1,

Hello Nick thank you, I think that some of these hard to get variations depend on what part of the world one lives in.

When I started collecting 1-75 models when I got my first 74a model it had the very pale Blue base, but some body had put their initals on the base in texta I think, it look me a long time of cleaning to erase it, even now there is a faint shadow still there.

George T.

I do love those base colours George, still missing the mid blue colour. I would also like to see the pink canteen.
74a Mobile refreshments canteen with black plastic wheels, I have only ever seen this one. I have found many others but all fake . 74b preproduction Daimler fleetline bus. J

My 74s:

Nice BPW Canteen Jason, really very hard to find. Do you have the model with BPW ø9x20 also?
Antonin

My colour or shades of the base plate.
Antonin

Different colour or shades of the white, cream and pink Canteen
Antonin

My apologies George for being somewhat late to the 74a party! I've been off at a dental conference and just back in this morning.

Antonin has posted a handsome pink example but since you asked George here is the pink model I acquired from Connecticut based vintage MATCHBOX collector Warren Burdick. What are the odds of Warren finding a spare pink model to sell to a friend? I'm glad he did!



And then here is the white, cream, pink trinity:



This base variation photo (L to R: dark blue, mid blue, sea green, light blue and pale blue) depicts the bases as they were known in the Stannard guide where both the pale blue and so called mid-blue were only known to have the rounded rivet base. Heck, George's photo is better, just go back and look at his.



As I engaged in my original base color variation hunts it was that mid-blue (I believe Christian calls this 'bright blue' and I almost think that is a better descriptor) that came to me last. I would watch on ebay and at shows for darker blue bases with that rounded rivet. I would assume that if a model had the rounded rivet and base darker than the common light blue it had to be what Stannard was calling 'mid-blue'. The first three times I found one I would get the model home and set it beside my 'dark blue' model with the spread rivet base and found that these rounded rivet models all matched the 'dark blue' model I had. It wasn't until my fourth try that I finally got a model with that true mid/bright blue base.
Thankfully Nick has properly noted that dark blue based models can have either a spread or rounded rivet.

Here is a photo showing the square-foot/spread rivet dark blue based model (Nick's code 16) in the center with the round rivet mid/bright blue based model (Nick's code 20) above and the round rivet dark blue based model (Nick's code 17) below. It was the top one that I had a devil of a time finding. It appears in Antonin's base photo that he also has the round rivet base in both mid/bright blue and dark blue:

newest acquisition thanks to Jason