City of Kingston Street-sweeper

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? This phrase may date to the seventeenth Century and the pedantic theological discussions of the day, but it resonates with me today - how many rocks can sit on the surface of one of my HO scale streets? After publishing the previous post on the Rideau Public School structure just installed on the layout, a sharp-eyed fellow modeller mentioned the gravel evident on the street and that I should get a street-sweeper! (Previous to the plumbing supply house, this location had hosted the Sowards coal office and access road!) I just happened to have a street-sweeper on hand, so I quickly posed it as if it were doing the clean-up:

Compare the before (above) with the after (below) and down below you'll find more on this transformation!

This 1999+ Matchbox street-sweeper is typical of their products that catch my eye in Wal-Mart, Toys R Us or even the local dollar store, while I'm reliving my second (kids) or third (grand-kids) childhood! They're inexpensive ($1.00-$1.50) and can be really good stand-ins for higher-priced scale models $25-40, if they are in fact available). In this case, it's an Elgin Pelican-model street-sweeper, scaled at 1:74, a little larger than HO scale which is 1:87 (prototype:model ratio i.e. 1 foot = 87 HO scale feet).

The Matchbox street-sweeper features moving parts: wheels that turn, a collection basket that raises, inverts, and dumps, and two side rotating brushes. The more I looked at my quick photo with the 'Metro Disposal' paint scheme above, the more I knew I needed to improve on it. (Though I chose to not pose a figure at either of the steering-wheels roughly modelled in the cab. This would have entailed disassembly and possible desecration of the model!) Also not modelled, the whirring noise and attendant Schroeder-like dust-clouds.

With only vague recollections of seeing a City of Kingston street-sweeper working downtown, and no prototype photos to refer to, I went with an overall cream-coloured paint job. Other options were overall white, or the long-applied turquoise-and-white scheme used on a variety of city works vehicles. I replaced the front toy-like wheels, painted all the wheel hubs, the basket, and most surfaces, then painted the brushes and tires grey. A coat of dilute grimy grey coated many of the just-painted surfaces. I touched up the running lights and top flashing light, hand grabs, leaving the stencilled equipment number at cab bottom. 

Posed in action, the basket comes out and gets dumped into a waiting truck:

The street-sweeper is ready to clean those messy Swamp Ward streets! Now, to add a tiny city crest to the cab...

I was lucky to not have this garish paint scheme to cover over with light coloured paint! The Matchbox street-sweeper has been produced in at least a half-dozen paint schemes, from purple to green to gold, tan and white!

And as Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed in his famous 'sweep streets' speech: 

"If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of Heaven and Earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well."