Bird's eye view
Page 45
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
by the Hawk
return to Leyland of Jim Slater will come as a great surprise to some folk, believed that when he parted company Leyland five years ago (he was deputy director under Sir Donald Stokes, as ias then) it was for good. Now he says ; very happy to be back, but he returns BLMC board member with a rather rent status from the one he left with. re's a little matter of a personal fortune aated at around to start with!
his first year as an independent in the ice world he achieved a profit of over ),000. Since then his buy-sell-invest;e-boost activities have made him a nd, and he is now chairman of a corn)/ (Slater-Walker Securities) which is :cted to turn in a profit approaching I. And he's still only 40.
ihen he first came into the Leyland t it was as an AEC man; now he is in he centre of a very different enterprise he right age to qualify as a "tip for the
"erminology!
ave never liked the American word ansportation" used when "Transport" ad do as well—though some might claim the longer word suggests a wider con: (another pet hate of mine). Now I have ience for shooting it down. In his paper the SRPTA this week, Brian Parker oed in an aside that the Oxford English tionary gives a definition of "transporta" as "removal to penal colony".
Now someone will come back at me with minder that "being transported" used to in the same thing. I refuse to budge. ,r hammer to thump "transportation" good one.)
Fred again
d Hope has been to Copenhagen, I see, not this time to give one of his fearless i-jack-knife demonstrations. Which was haps just as well, since the city was in grip of arctic weather. He had been ed to take one of his automatic brake idition indicators to the Scandinavian omotive accessories fair. Guess where
the Scandinavians heard about his brake device in the first place? Commercial Motor, of course.
Now Fred says that some form of brake wear indicator may be made compulsory in Denmark for all large lorries and trailers. The Danish transport ministry has circulated operators with proposed legislation.
*Five to six
Recently we carried a report about Noel McDonald's promotion to the post of chief officer of Sheffield's new public transport group. Mr. McDonald, at present g.m. of Coventry Corporation Transport, expressing his opinion, said that it was senseless to encourage motorists to leave their cars at home and then expect them to stand on buses —he believed in o-m-o double-deckers rather than standee single-deckers, as clearly shown by Coventry's policy in recent years.
Now I am told that Eric Kay, Brighton's general manager, after experimenting with o-m-o single-deckers, said on Sunday at the British Coach Rally that he was going back to double-deckers. The single-deckers were too long and it took six 33ft vehicles to carry the same number of passengers as five equivalent capacity double-deckers, the latter just over 30ft in length. In his opinion longer single-deckers not only took up more road space, they also provided garaging problems. Can it be that London Transport is the only major bus operator out of step?
* Platform to Pulpit
Many readers will remember with affection the voluble and authoritative opinions which have been heard on many occasions at public transport conferences over the years from Chaceley Humpidge, who was general manager at Bradford before he moved to Sheffield City Transport eight years ago, Mr. Humpidge officially retires at the end of this month from Sheffield, although you won't find him at his desk if you go there now because he is down at Cambridge studying for the Church of England ministry. Changing the platform for the pulpit, so to speak! After he has been ordained he hopes to be appointed curate in his own parish at Ecclesall, near Sheffield.
* Neat
The neat way in which the Goodrich rubber company in the USA is taking steps to avoid a take-over tickles my sense of humour. The company has bought a road haulage concern —because the bid for Goodrich is being made by a railroad group, and under the Interstate Commerce Commission's rules a rail carrier may not seek ownership of a public carrier in another mode. Quick thinking by those company lawyers.
*Not levied
I owe an apology, freely given, to the operator I referred to in my column on March 28 as having been hoist with a training levy demand after writing to criticize a piano removals technique used at the RTITB Motec. Seems the man from the Board was a bit previous in telling me about this— because it simply hasn't happened.