bird's eye view by the Hawk
Page 29
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• Ask a policeman
Information-gathering is one of the essential elements of police work but I am always amazed at the depth of knowledge which policemen acquire, especially in the country where things change more slowly. We had good reason to discover this recently when a vehicle on extended CM road test was stopped by a very observant pair of Scottish coppers in a small Lowland village. They wondered what a heavily laden vehicle was doing late in the evening in their manor.
The test drivers were quickly able to reassure the law that all was in order, but it proved difficult to get away simply because of the policemen's interest. They were extremely knowledgeable about details of this particular new vehicle and commented, for example, that the very long wheelbase of the tractive unit would make it suitable for higher gross weights if these were ever introduced. In fact, it seemed there was very little that they did not know about truck design and the legal requirements and prospects.
But they were equally well-informed about transport in general—especially, as one might expect, as it affected their area. They remarked that now that C-licensees could carry for hire or reward under their operator's licence many of them were bringing return loads back from Southern England when they would formerly have had to travel empty, and local hauliers were feeling the pinch in consequence. Rates were being cut to ribbons, and local contractors looked like going to the wall.
• Durable Dart
One of the most striking transport liveries to. be seen on British motorways these days
belongs to Blue Dart Transport, and several readers have asked for a bit more information about the company. Appropriately enough, there is an illustrated feature on this company in the summer issue of the British Vita Magazine. It seems that Blue Dart was started in 1947 when Harold Aitkin, then a demobbed soldier, bought a Luton van and started a haulage business in London. Today he is chairman of the company, which runs more than 400 tractive units and trailers.
In 1951 Harold Aitkin acquired W. T. Noble and Son, and then about 15 years latex a big customer, Vitafoam, bought a 50 per cent interest, which it later converted into a total holding in the company. Readers may remember that CM carried an article on the Noble and Vita Transport set-up about a couple of years ago, and it is since then that the new Blue Dart livery has become so prominent.
The idea behind the Vita acquisition, of course, was to integrate professional haulage skills into the fleet which carried the Vitafoam products, as well as carrying profitably on haulage licences. Now, with "0" licensing, it seems that Blue Dart carries roughly 60 per cent for its own group and 40 per cent for outside companies, and it is running regular nightly trunks from Manchester to London, Scotland, South Wales, Barrow and Newcastle upon Tyne.
• An old 'un restored
At 38 years of age ERF chassis number 63 looks as good as new—and so it should— because the vehicle designated the C14, a four-wheeler designed for 12-ton gross operation, has just been rebuilt to match the original specification.
It had an unladen weight of 4 tons and was underrated at 6 tons payload. Apparently this was done because it was common practice to overload vehicles in the 30s! Number 63 was first operated by W. F. Gilbert, of Leyton Buzzard, and was powered by a Gardner 4LW diesel engine.
The rebuilding was supervised by Tommy Pickering, retired chief of the company's experimental department, with advice from the original designer Ernest Sherratt, who is deputy chairman of ERF (Holdings) Ltd.
The reason that this first vehicle was numbered 63 is that its construction year coincided with the age of E. R. Foden who was founder of the company.
• Bogged down
What does it cost to bog down a tipper? Well, it really depends how good you are at bogging down tippers. On a construction site not far from my office it happens almost once each hour. Four-wheelers, six-wheelers, eight-wheelers find themselves up to the axles in mud and the strange thing is it always happens at exactly the same spot.
It can take anything from an hour to three hours to get the vehicle moving again. On one morning this week 12 vehicles stood idly by while a Priestman loader and an HM 580 loader pulled and pushed at a 12 cu yd tipper before releasing it. At £2 per hour for the vehicles, that runs to £72 and, at £3 for the loaders, that would run to another £18: £90 and at the end of the exercise the eight-wheeler left the site half !cede&
• Armageddon
A haulier said to me last week: "I think the end of the world must be coming. A dealer has just tried to persuade me to buy a brand new Scania, by offering a discount!"