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This one was too nice to just toss into my Latest Projects thread. I'm digging through the beater pile and a come across this hopper train is a plastic bag. I dump it out and have a look and see it's a complete M4 (trailer and all). There was another smaller bag that dumps out with it, I open that up and find all 19 Original Grey Tires in the Bag! Woo Hoo ... I got started on this little beauty straight away. I started to make labels but opted to do decals instead. I sooo want to keep this one, but off to ebay she goes.

Are those orange hubs?

All 19 hubs are red.

This one is not restored and has some minor high edge wear. It was in my collection for many years and came with a C-8 condition box. It too has red hubs.
I had one orange hub set that I bought around 2005 (+/-). It had heavy play wear and came with zero tires (not even the spare was present). I restored it (leaving the orange hubs in tact) but the hubs were badly shrunken and even reproduction tires were still loose on the model. I placed black reproduction tires on it (that's what was available at the time). I wonder what color tires it came with when new.

Hugh still has me thinking about tire and hub colors. The restored model above was bought with the intent of restoring and I paid next to nothing for it. If the tires didn't come on the model when it was new, to gather up 19 GPT off other models is a lot of effort to basically give them away with a very play worn model. The nice original model shown in the above post was a bargain find, not because of the GPT, but because the box was in such nice shape. It would have been a good deal for a BPT model without a box. The GPT and the box were a real bonus.

I would love to learn more about this Major and if there is a relationship between tire colors and hub colors. It's does stand to reason that the orange hubs came on very early models. Both the Hopper Train and the Guy Warrior came out at about the same time and it's logical the orange hubs and GPT were shared between them. I think switching to red hubs and BPT tires made the Hopper Train look more realistic and offered a better contrast for the silver trailers.

The 1-75 Hatra came out a year later and had the same orange hubs & GPT at first. Then the hubs switched to Red and they kept the GPT for a short time before going to red hub and BPT. Oddly enough, the Guy kept the orange hubs and GPT into is first release as a King in 67 (someone at Lesney really liked the look of the Guy with orange hubs and GPT). By the time the Mack Dumper entered the 1-75 series in 68, it came with red hubs and BPT. That's probably when the orange hubs and GPT tires were phased out on the Guy. The orange hubs stayed on the Guy Warrior during the transition to BPT and shortly after they too where phased out to Red hubs.

That makes me wonder if there are orange hub and BPT on any M4s? What is interesting is that there are cataloged model variations of the K4 Hopper Train with red hubs and GPT. If the GPT M4s & K4s are so hard to find, was it because the the two color tires were used (on the M4 & K4) alternately as the need arose?

The Hopper train was a tire hog by anyone's calculation. The M8 / K8 used 8 tires total for the tractor and trailer where as the M4 / K4 used 19 tires.  That's close to 2.25 times the number of tires so I can see maybe a shortage happening from time to time which could be solved by dipping into the Guy Warrior tire bins.

Neat one.