It's Finally Here

The Oxford Diecast Miniatures HO scale 1950 Studebaker Champion Starlight Coupe is finally here. To me a definitive car to start the 1950s with its radical streamlined design. 

The color (colour for the UK and former British colonies/international English speaking/reading audience) is named Tulip Cream. Additional colors are promised by Oxford. The license plate is black with yellow letters and numbers. Appropriate for early 1950's California vehicle registration. No year tag is visible.

Granted this would be a luxury car unlikely to be seen in the Port Costa employees parking lot. Nobody else would be parking there in the early 1950's. Oxford loves to produce exotic US vehicles such as the 1942 Packard Woodie (station wagon) of which only 1000 were made before WW 2 production ceased. Vehicles for the Hollywood and New York elites not humble railroad employees of the Southern Pacific. 

Unfortunately the prices have tripled for Oxford Diecast HO cars from 3 years ago when I used to get them from now disappeared Hattons of Liverpool, once the largest international internet seller of model railways products. It's the US importer and dealers now getting their bigger cut (200%). This one came through Walthers and my local hobby store. $15.95 plus 9.75% sales tax versus 4.50 GBP, roughly US $5.00. Still worth it to me. 

With the price increase it has made it more likely I will source more US layout vehicles as 3D prints.  I have a pretty big collection of British OO 1930's and 40's Oxford scale vehicles, a few of which I can use as background passenger cars on the US HO Port Costa layout. Port Costa was also an out of the way place that was off any main roads. (It still is.) so only people who lived or worked on the railroad or in the Sugar docks at Crockett and refineries or factories there or nearby would be seen in Port Costa.  

On a personal note, in 1950 at age 6 I was living in the LA area and actually visited Hollywood studios with my well connected soon to be step mother. She wangled a visit to meet William S. Boyd, Hopalong Cassidy my 6 year old idol of the silver screen. No pictures have survived of me in a black jeans and fancy cowboy had with silver pistols but I remember the visit well.  

I don't remember seeing the Studebaker in this color while living in LA but (as a newly minted US American boy having just emigrated from still recovering south of England). 

In the fall of 1950, my parents moved to Billings, Montana and I got to see real American cowboys....two very big culture  shocks in a year...plus a total change in the language I had first learned. In Billings, I would get beat up in the 2nd grade speaking funny (English accent and using big words.) In 1952 I had a partial cultural reprieve when my parents moved back to California and San Francisco. But only partial as we lived way out in the cold, damp, foggy Sunset district.