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Ross_K

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This is lovely - got to be the one some of us were drooling over on eBay last year sometime!Depressing to see so many English number plates! :(

Strange (for me anyway) that the Rekord estate would be on UK plates.Surely there was a equivalent Vauxhall at that time?And yeah there were a lot of cars present with UK plates - I guess people can't be arsed paying they duty and re-registering them.If customs catch you though, you could be in deep doodoo :lol:That Rekord was taxed in the UK until December and the DVLA site shows it as being exported. It had an Irish insurance disc in the windscreen as well so maybe the owner'll plod around in it until the tax is up and then re-register it...
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Strange (for me anyway) that the Rekord estate would be on UK plates.Surely there was a equivalent Vauxhall at that time?

Vauxhall & Opel were two distinctly separate brands at the time of that Ascona... bodies and engines were not "common" until the next generation of the Ascona, which was the same as a Mk1 Cavalier. I suppose the closest Vaux would have been the FE Victor, with the slant-4 and lovely "hunchback" wagon varient.
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Strange (for me anyway) that the Rekord estate would be on UK plates.Surely there was a equivalent Vauxhall at that time?

Until at least the 80s I think, Opel cars were offered over here alongside their Vauxhall counterparts. Infact I think it was only when they stopped producing models which were similar sister vehicles as opposed to rebadged clones they stopped bothering to bring rhd Opels to our shores on general sale.....
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That Rekord was taxed in the UK until December and the DVLA site shows it as being exported. It had an Irish insurance disc in the windscreen as well so maybe the owner'll plod around in it until the tax is up and then re-register it...

I remember seeing it on eBay last year. Completely unsurprised it has ended up in the Emerald Isle - they love old Opels! My mint '78 Rekord 2.0S Berlina went to Belfast about 3 years back...the bloke took it over the border to a show in Dublin and was promptly offered 5000 Euros for it by an Opel dealer!
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Depressing to see so many English number plates! :(

And yeah there were a lot of cars present with UK plates - I guess people can't be arsed paying they duty and re-registering them.
It does sound like this is becoming a major problem. On the other hand perhaps a fair number of UK-reg cars at the show were actually UK-owned and on holiday at the time?
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My mint '78 Rekord 2.0S Berlina went to Belfast about 3 years back...the bloke took it over the border to a show in Dublin and was promptly offered 5000 Euros for it by an Opel dealer!

You stayed in touch then! Did he accept?
Well I would have...the exchange rate then meant £3k for him, not bad given he'd paid me £1300 (and I made money - there's a rarity!).But luckily for the car's general well-being, he doesn't ever intend to sell it. Bit of a nutter, in a nice way...it joined a '68 Cooper S and a '76 924 auto (28th off the line!) in his "fleet", each car kept in a dehumidified garage and pumped through with 15L of Waxoyl on purchase...basically the fella had no vices other than old cars, so that's what all his spare money got spent on.I'm pretty sure it's still on the UK plates (VDP958S) but of course you can do that in Northern Ireland, it doesn't have to be put onto an NI plate anymore. In fact when my mate worked there recently and had a company car, it was on a UK plate anyway...
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To be honest it doesn't bother me what plates are on a car as long as they're insured. Although I'll probably change my tune the day some Polish or Latvian car crashes into me...The government doesn't share my view though, as they're losing out on revenue.When I moved back from Scotland I managed to keep my Xantia on UK plates for nearly a full year before being nabbed at a customs checkpoint at seven in the morning. :lol: mk2_craig - most of the UK cars had Irish insurance discs so I'd say they fell into the category of Irish people dodging import duty rather than people on holiday

I'm pretty sure it's still on the UK plates (VDP958S) but of course you can do that in Northern Ireland, it doesn't have to be put onto an NI plate anymore. In fact when my mate worked there recently and had a company car, it was on a UK plate anyway...

I think that back in the bad old days in the North, you were probably less likely to have your company car or van taken from you at gunpoint if you had local plates.
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Is it really a ‘problem’? The cars still exist and are no more than a ferry journey or a short flight away from us. If people there are prepared to pay more and it keeps decent stuff on the roads somewhere then all well and good.

No more on the road spots of anything decent? :o The Bromley Pageant having to be shelved, taken over the water & renamed the Limerick Pageant? :shock: Ok a bit far fetched but you get the idea....
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Is there even a difference between mainland & Northern Ireland registrations now?When I was working there the car I was provided had a generic "xx52xxx" type registration, seemed to be alot of that style of reg on the roads too... plus added confusion now that UK plates can have Z's in them...

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Is it really a ‘problem’? The cars still exist and are no more than a ferry journey or a short flight away from us. If people there are prepared to pay more and it keeps decent stuff on the roads somewhere then all well and good.

I wasn't actually alluding to a "disappearing shite" problem - more generally the issue of foreign-registered vehicles in illegal use, regardless of which country we're talking about. No doubt a major loss of income to the Irish government.Works both ways in Jersey. The registration authorities here haven't got a clue how many local vehicles are in use because there's no road tax and therefore no annual check on what's in circulation; there's something like 114,000 vehicles registered here (population just over 90,000) but more realistically perhaps 70,000 are actually in use; accordingly there's no way 44,000 parked up out of use - most of them will have been scrapped or exported without being declared.Similarly there's no check on what comes into or goes out of the island and some foreign cars have been in use for years, although the authorities do act where these vehicles are stopped in police road checks etc.
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Is there even a difference between mainland & Northern Ireland registrations now?

The DVLNI are still a separate entity from the DVLA as far as I know, and still dish out the "council estate personal plates". :lol:
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Anyway, back to the photos...

 

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Sweet Jesus. My eyes!! A Beardmore taxi...

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I was speaking to the owner of this pickup. "Made from about twenty different cars" he laughed. Sure enough, Pug 405 alloys were just the tip of the iceberg. We had a moan about the MK1 Escort situation - we both reckoned they were shit back then and nothing's changed.

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Soon to be sprayed yellow and installed as an advertising piece on a back-street second hand car dealership?

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  • 2 weeks later...

A few more spots from the bowels of my phone:

 

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Battered French 405 GLD-iseasel

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There's a UK-reg Golf convertible in this photo somewhere with the exhaust hanging off. It's been there for a while now, so it's probably safe to say it's abandoned...

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318i

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Nissan March

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I like the 'No dumping' sign in the background. Kinda ironic.

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Haven't seen one of these in the wild since god knows when...

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What a missed opportunity! A few years ago, the plate off the Rekord:

 

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Could have been placed on this Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) 4 ton armoured Pinkie:

 

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For the unfamiliar, these Landies are scary b'stards, sometimes used by police to smash up burning road barricades.

 

EDITED TO ADD: Your photos are first class, BTW.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Ancient Buick.

Brass plate on the windscreen says 'Bedford Works, London'.

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Couple of Ovlovs:

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Yank stuff.

I've seen the Trans Am on the road quite a few times. Someone's daily driver??

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This land barge must be a bitch to park:

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Tidy Porka:

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Awesome frontage on this one. But she turned around just as I snapped the photo... :(

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My 1 year-old son trying to get into yet another red car...

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All aboard the scene bus:

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Another Caterham clone:

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No idea what this is. I had some shots of the front but they've disappeared

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Couple of farmers chewing the fat:

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DMC 12

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The spit of AEW424Y which cost me £30 with 6 weeks tax and test in 2003 and got me from Biggleswade to Edinburgh drama-free the next day

 

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Hey, someone out there somewhere evidently still has the gear to make those elusive Serck Marston style pressed tin plates :)

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Hey, someone out there somewhere evidently still has the gear to make those elusive Serck Marston style pressed tin plates :)

Some guy north of Dublin somewhere. I came across an ad of his on some forum or other. I'll see if I can track the details down again...
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FIND HIM! Theres a lot of people out there want some of those plates.

I spotted two builders vans today sporting modern euro plates with the Serck font, so someone local is definitely knocking them out. Shouldn't be too hard to find as there are only a handful of places around here making metal plates. Stay tuned... :D
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