2) The crane is actually built from scratch using styrene shapes and plasti-card corrugate. It isn't animated, however the good part of the story is it was built by a good mate of mine in West Australia. It featured prominently on a quayside scene on his railroad. When he started over anew, the crane became surplus to his requirement so, in a fit of silliness on our part, we decided to see if we could ship it to the opposite side of the world. It wasn't an inexpensive exercise but we pulled it off, making for a great model with a really good story behind it.
3) As far as era, the scenario chosen dictates the date, in this case 1975. BTW, those cabs were built by Checker, a company dedicated to building taxis in America. They built taxis with the same basic carbody from about 1960 to 1982, and quite a few are still in existence today. Like the locos and rolling stock, the vehicles change out where necessary to re-enforce the chosen date of a scenario.
The real limits as to how early I can go with any plausibility are the buildings, especially things like those elevated yard structures. About the earliest I can believably go is about 1960 and currently the latest scenario is set in 1980.
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