Turns out that if you're using this version of the Ubuntu 14.04 Image and you do an apt-get upgrade
then it seems to overwrite /etc/init/cloud-init-local.conf
which appears to cause the next boot to fail.
It is the only difference I could find when building the image repeatadly over the last few hours.
Getting the Rackspace Nova client upgraded (my old one didn't work) so that I could see the current Ubuntu Trusty Image ID gave me a different problem with the new image (28153eac-1bae-4039-8d9f-f8b513241efe) that I have now dealt with.
Wish list: It would be very nice if there were easily findable lists of Image IDs kind of like this: