The Tim Pollard collection: Dark Future and Rogue Trader vehicles

Last June the excellent Realm of Chaos 80s blog posted an article about Tim Pollard, former stalwart of Games Workshop back in the glory days of the 80's. This blog post, together with a subsequent one, revealed the incredible painted miniature and original GW artwork collection in Tim's possession. Tim revealed during the course of the blog post that he was involved in the advertising of GW minis back in the day and remarked that "in order to advertise the minis I got sent at least one of each to photograph, and then I got to keep them". This raised an intriguing possibility: if Tim still had these miniatures in his possession, could they include some previously unknown rarities? Not being one to miss a potential opportunity to mine for hidden treasure, I got in touch with Tim and he agreed to let me trawl through his collection of castings (which was very kind of him given that Tim is incredibly busy being Nottingham's official Robin Hood and that he is about to become a proud parent!).

Tim was initially concerned that he might not have anything of note in his collection of castings, other than a large number of general release figures. As it turned out he didn't need to worry! The first thing I was presented with on meeting Tim was a large box of mainly preslotta figures of mixed manufacturer. I immediately spotted some parts of the Citadel Giant (you know - the Citadel Giant) lying in the box. Nice, pretty rare, but OK not an eye-popper. But then my attention was drawn to a metal vehicle lying amongst the figures. It gradually dawned on me that I was looking at a metal casting of a prototype Dark Future Interceptor (production castings were plastic). Here is a view of Tim's metal prototype followed by a plastic production casting:

Image from the collecting-citadel-miniatures.com wiki

If you look closely you will see some minor difference between the cars, a feature that is typical of metal prototype vs plastic production figures.

Good start!

Tim then presented me with were some fantastic scratch-built/converted Rogue Trader vehicles. The first one  is a scratch-built vehicle by Aly Morrison, which was a prototype Rogue Trader vehicle:

It's reminiscent of the original Rhino. Apparently the wheels are ink bottle caps!

The next two vehicles are modifications of existing toys:

The last one has a dreadnought lascannon arm mounted on top as a weapon. Can you spot any other bolt-ons from figures of the period?

Tim wasn't sure if these vehicles appeared in any White Dwarf mags or rulebooks of the time. If any of them look familiar please let me know.

More good stuff to come.