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I recently purchase a job lot of diecast and included in it was a Dinky 984 Auto Services Transporter (1958-63)

It was missing the loading ramp as is often the case, but it looked otherwise ok. The deck lifting mechanism which is another weak point on these was also in good order.

It wasn’t until I’d had it for a few days that I noticed something unusual which is that it has red plastic wheel hubs – this model usually has grey cast metal Supertoy hubs.

I’ve had a good look over the model and I’m sure that it has never been taken apart or restored.

A trawl through Google images turned up one solitary other picture of a red one with red hubs but the page it led to annoyingly made no mention of the wheels.

One possible explanation is that in 1963 the red transporter was superseded by number 989 which was a yellow, grey and blue version of the same casting (1963-65)  and this later version came with red plastic hubs so it might be that there was some overlap in production or that they ran out of the metal wheels before they changed the colour scheme.