bird's eye view by the Hawk
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El Boom-boom
Nice to know that road haulage wheels are really spinning again. Reports reaching me by various means from round the country suggest that there are now hardly any pockets of recession left — though the two years of tough conditions have certainly brought casualties, and there are some names that will not decorate a truck cab again.
Even in Scotland, which had an alarming number of trucks standing against the wall for a worryingly long time, the transport demand really has taken off. Hauliers who were begging for traffic even a few months ago now can't find enough vehicles to cope with the work.
1 gather there's a particular demand for 40ft trailers — both platforms and skeletals — in some quarters. A lot more timber is coming in 40ft unsawn beams from abroad, for example.
El Cost conscious
Talking of trailers, I asked a major trailer manufacturer whether the DoE safe loading code had resulted in a demand for higher standards of construction — in headboards, for example. Seems not. In fact this company, following the recommendations of the code, has been offering operators a headboard capable of meeting the code's suggested standard (able to withstand an evenly distributed forward load equal to half the payload capacity) but there have been few, if any, takers. It's the old question of a higher price.
Understandable, but a pity.
1:1 Old, old story
I was intrigued to learn from a recent speech by NFC chairman Dan Pettit that "juggernaut" has a history of use as an epithet directed at transport — only the earlier application was to railways, not lorries.
He recalled that on that notorious occasion, the opening of the LiverpoolManchester Railway in 1830, when a certain William Huskisson was killed, the Liverpool Examiner reported that "Mr Huskisson has been juggernauted by the Railway".
And in 1845 Punch published a cartoon of the Railway Juggernaut to illustrate the disastrous effects the railways were having on the quality of life. "We will back old Father Thames for the moving of goods and people against the Woolwich Railway for any sum," it asserted.
Sounds odd now, when the railways keep parading their purity and publishing knocking ads.
But Dan Pettit pointed the moral nicely: "The road haulier must do better in recognizing the environmental requirements of the 20th century than the railways did in the 19th century."
CI Wormeaten !
It's not often you hear heavy lorries praised by observers of wild life but a recent broadcast in a nature programme said in effect that some East Anglian birds (feathered variety) profited considerably from heavy vehicles.
It appears that some bright birds have noted that the effect of a constant stream of heavy traffic at a King's Lynn roundabout is to induce large numbers of worms to emerge through the soil. Daft things. The earth tremors induced by the passing lorries on the tut-impacted soil on the roundabout explains the phenomenon. The same birds, mostly gulls, "clock in", daily.
It appears that a helicopter downdraught is also useful in spiriting worms up to the surface. Gulls are cute enough to know that — if really hungry — they can induce a tasty meal to emerge by prolonged hovering, the strong wing-beat inducing a miniscule earth vibration. I must consider whether to forgo my usual breakfast of dormice in favour of a quick trip to that King's Lynn roundabout.
0 Spit 'n' polish
It was a beautiful rig. An F88 Volvo pulling a Crane Fruehauf lowloader, painted bright yellow.
Everything about it shone; well, almost everything. A policeman in a panda car thought differently. The driver was pulled up and invited to clean the lenses on his rear light and winker assemblies and to clean the dirt off the rear marker plate.
I waited until the operation was completed, and what a difference it made. Now it was all shining; even the driver as he walked back to his cab seemed to be beaming. If this is part of a police campaign to help "clean up" the industry then all power to their elbow.