Top marks for observation

摘要

For many of us of a certain age, one of the objects that helped reinforce our youthful interest in buses was the Dinky Toy observation coach, actually a Maudslay Marathon HI with bodywork by James Whitson & Co. of Sipson, one of the communities around today's Heathrow Airport. The toys were far more numerous than the real thing, and Neville Mercer spells out just how rare the original design was in his fascinating account of this class of high-level coaches. Whitson built only 27 on front-engined chassis between 1948 and 1951, and of these just seven were Maudslays.