I track very carefully what is sold at Little Wheels, what type & make of model and where it goes. We shipped more than 10,000 models in 2013 and a more than a quarter of those were buses, trams & coaches.

That's an awful lot of public transport vehicles, who buys them?

About half of them go to collectors in the UK, the rest go around the world to 50 different countries so far. Unsurprisingly given the reference to place on the destination blinds of the buses, countries where there are large ex-pat British communities are high on the list, Canada & Australia mainly, although the USA accounts for more than those two put together. Mind you that statistic is skewed by a single collector in New Jersey who has single handedly bought more than half the buses I have sent to the US. Over 300 at the last count. He really likes buses.

Where else? Well, there is a strong bus collecting community in Brazil and also Mexico, both of which surprise me a little, not sure why.

However when I send a 1950s AEC RT to Thailand, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Vietnam or Chile I'm really curious about where they end up and who is buying them.