keeping them running
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Ron Cater Judging by the comments ma,e to members of Commercial Motor staff, the Croydon fatal accident (CM June 26) involving a container has aroused considerable interest in loadsecuring methods. Too often one sees timber without chains or paper reels carried with no frontend bolster.
When I have tackled drivers about such methods I have more often than not been quite derisively told that they have been in use for donkey's years. That, I feel, is all very well but vehicles now travel very much fester and can produce braking in the region of 0.7 quite easily—which means that a 10-ton load will try to move forward with a force equivalent to 7 tons.
I would refer readers back to the CM Road and Workshop series Loads and Forces which ran through a large part of 1969 when Handyman made a great many references to such problems. Remember always that a vehicle's load is usually the larger part of its gross weight.
One enterprising company, having seen the photos in CM, promptly sent me its literature about container securing chains known by the name of HeMBeL. The company is Herbert MorrisBrown Lennox Ltd, of West Ferry Road, Millwall, London E14. The chains were specially designed for securing containers on flatbeds with no locks and it seems that they have been adopted by National Carriers Ltd and a fair number of other major haulage companies.