bird's eye view by the Hawk
Page 39
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• With love?
John Murly's harrowing experiences of getting goods to and from Russia by road (this column, June 29) are about to be put to the test by a different haulier. Bradford haulier G. C. Morley Ltd is sending a Volvo to Frankfurt to pick up a 40ft semi-trailer with nearly £400,000-worth of TV equipment owned by an American company; and after televising an international athletics contest in Munich and another in Turin the outfit will set off for Minsk and Odessa to attend US-Soviet contests.
At the wheel for this 5500-mile marathon will be Ernest Barker and his co-driver, making G. C. Morley's first foray behind the iron curtain. They're well-equipped for the trip from an entertainment point of view — the cab has a stereo tape player and, of course, a television set.
• Getting the bird
When Derbyshire haulier Jim Holbard told his employees to keep one of his three trailers off the road as it had "nedificating erithaca rubeculas" in the chassis they were, to say the least, a bit baffled — especially the mechanic.
After seeing the poor mechanic glancing quizzically at the trailer on several occasions, Jim, a keen ornithologist, decided to end his suffering and explain — this time in more understandable terms — that a pair of robins were nesting in the sub-frame.
He said later:"It was fortunate that we could easily manage with just the two trailers at the time, I only hope they don't come back to raise a second brood when we are busy!"
• Scenic slag
If there's not one sort of gold in them thar hills perhaps there's another. Potteries Motor Traction Company is running tours round the slag heaps of Stoke-on-Trent at 25p a head in 49-seat "sunshine" coaches.
The aim is to highlight the reclamation work being carried out on the city's 1700 acres of colliery tips and it's obviously a draw — over 1000 passengers have already been carried.
Attempts farther north to show the seamier side of life have not proved so successful. When Elf Alternative Tours applied to the Scottish Traffic Commissioners for a licence for "mysery" tours to show visitors to Edinburgh how the "ordinary people of the city live and work" they were successfully opposed by Edinburgh Corporation and Scottish Omnibuses.
The planned route was through less attractive housing schemes, Leith Docks and included a visit to Seafield sewage works.
The established operators have obviously been missing out on this sociological scene. The Corrunissioners were told by the objectors that they both had services through these areas "but did not go out of their way to highlight the sewage development".
• Yeugh!
It seems a sludgy sort of week, one way and another. Fusion Ltd have sent me a couple of their joke pens — large, brightly coloured, tapered ballpoints marked with graduations up the stem that read "Ugh", "Yeugh", "Average", "Nice one Cyril" and "British Standard Whale". (They make Whale gully emptiers).
One pen, the gully gauge, is for probing potty gullies; the other, the Horrometer, for industrial cesspool work.
Trouble is, some people really believe the chat which goes with this publicity exercise. I heard of one chap who, on being told with tongue in cheek to hold his gully gauge ten feet above the grating and drop it through, got very upset at the prospect of losing his bright new pen.
Still, don't expect to read operational trials of the Horrometer in this column.
• Truck stets
Tearing myself away from the jousting, rallycross, hot air ballooning and delayeddrop parachuting at Ford's Summer Fair at Bramcote, I put in some real work with a senior Forliman on the subject of how much the British commercial vehicle market is going to grow.
Ford see the total over-3.5-ton c.v market in the UK as 75,000 this year, 80,000 in 1976 and 84,000 in 1980. They see the 3.5 to 7-ton-gvw market going from 11,000 this year to 17,000 in 1980 and (most significant from several points of view) the 1973 market of 9800 for over-7-ton vehicles rising to 19,800 by 1980.