¶ Original livery is normally the usual tramway modelling custom, although LCC No.1 is shown in the later post-1938 livery carried for the majority of its service life in London.  Known as 'Bluebird' when it first emerged in 1932, it sported a unique blue and ivory livery.  This was lost in early in 1938 when London Transport repainted the tram with the customary red and cream colour scheme.

Both these model tramcars were built by Tony Hildreth, with the logistics of transporting the two metre long Croydon Tramlink car between layouts requiring the tram to being driven into its container!

The reason for the trolley-pole on Tony Hildreth's excellent 1/16 scale model of Croydon 2530 is a practical one. In 1/16 scale a working tram layout nearly always uses temporarily-erected track

This means that the fine-scale OHL needs to be fitted from scratch, erected, aligned, and tensioned, every time the layout is used. It is relatively straightforward to do this for trolley-pole operation, as the trolley-pole is very tolerant of OHL misalignment or wrong tensioning, and doesn't snag span-wires either.

In contrast, the pantograph is distinctly intolerant of these things, as [slightly surprisingly] is a bow-collector. So model trams in 1/16 scale have the correct pantograph or bow-collector fitted for static display purposes, but a trolley pole for working operation. In the case of Tony Hildreth's Croydon model, when displayed statically it is of course fitted with the correct single-arm pantograph.