Feeling My Age

Getting older has its drawbacks – but it's a lot better than the alternative.

Posts Tagged ‘ Bristol ’

A Standard Companion

August 4, 2011 • Feeling My Age • Comments

Standard 10 Companion - snapped with Instagram
Standard 10 Companion – a slice of 1954 glimsed on a Bristol housing estate.
[Instagram]

From the MotorBase website:
Standard added a larger capacity Ten model to its small car range in 1954. The Ten used an all new 948cc version of the four cylinder engine already in use in the Eight. Like the Eight the Ten engine also featured overhead valves and a four speed gearbox. The Ten also shared the same four door bodyshell with the Eight, but was thankfully better equipped than its smaller sister.

The Standard Ten came with a proper, full width chrome grille, hub-caps, wind-down windows and an external boot-lid on the saloon model. In addition to the saloon Standard also offered an attractive estate model, known as the Companion. What set the Ten Companion apart from its competition (the Minor Traveller, 100E Squire and A35 Countryman) was the additional rear passenger doors. All of its rivals had to make do with the normal “two door”, van type arrangement.

The British Railways Lion

July 22, 2011 • Feeling My Age • Comments

Vintage Pullman car

Glimpsed the old heraldic post-war BR logo on this slightly shabby line of Pullman cars, parked up at Bristol station to advertise the Cornish Riviera Express.

Red lion rampant with long blue tongue atop a coronet with oak leaf, English rose, Scottish thistle and a couple of Welsh leeks; gripping the spoked steel wheel of a steam locomotive in its blue claws. The design is imperial, timeless and triumphant: Queen Victoria would have loved it.

Alas, what actually lay in store for British Railways were massive operating losses, Dr Beeching’s axe and John Major’s cack-handed privatisation which still costs taxpayers an arm and a leg to this day..

British Railways lion logo