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• Yakkity yak
Dan Pettit has declared 1973 the Year of the Yak, and has launched Transport 2001 as a society for the promotion of the Yak.
Revealing this shrewd environmental counterstroke at the RHA Met and SE annual dinner on Monday the National Freight Corporation chairman admitted that his twin inspirations for this move were the Chinese decision to call 1973 the Year of the Ox and the coincidental inauguration of Transport 2000 — dedicated to getting more freight back on to rail in the name of a cleaner Britain.
He offered himself as the founder father of the new society, dedicated to getting the yak accepted as the next-generation freight transporter; members will be dubbed "yakkers".
• The ideal mode
Founder-father Pettit was quick to point out the yak's advantages. It is a quiet, clean, submissive and well-behaved beast of burden, creating negligible track costs and able to see adequately in fog on motorways. The fact that it doesn't care to travel through busy city centres is seen as a great recommendation, and it is selfparking, not subject to VAT, and if stopped by police or weights and measures officers for a check on its axle loadings it can conveniently shift its weight from one leg to another.
Enumerating many other attractions of this pollution-free transport mode, Dan Pettit kept its greatest attribute to last: It would keep lorries off the roads and thus hasten the return to a Stone-Age economy, with the blessings of living on free air and a starvation diet.
Did someone murmur blow you, yak, I'm all right?
• Dopey driver?
7..rom yaks to Snow White, would you telieve? I knew coach drivers get them;elves involved in some rum things, and are toted for their initiative in tricky situations, )ut this week's news from Blueways ..uxury Coaches, London SW11, takes :ome beating.
The company has a Ford-Plaxton coach m three-month hire to Walt Disney Productions for a touring group presenting Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in the UK and Ireland — and one of the two drivers is doubling as a dwarf because they're an actor short!
The coach itself is out of the ordinary, too — it has dressing rooms and TV, and is fitted with exterior stereo speakers.
• Shock tactics
Many firms draw the attention of their drivers to the need for road safety, but I've seen nothing so painfully frank as the brightly coloured leaflets which SGB is handing out.
Says one — overprinted on a red and black picture of a bad crash —"Every 10 hours an SGB driver is involved in an accident. 66 per cent of road accidents involving company vehicles are caused by SGB drivers".
Sounds as though the company is in need of a new driver selection or driver training programme.
Other leaflets issued by the SGB Group Transport Division provide dire warnings of the ways in which licence or life may be lost through unsafe loads or bad tyres. One is headed "You could be fined up to £200 for overloading an SGB vehicle".
A press .release with the pamphlets says SGB is campaigning for road safety. I'm glad to hear it. Since one pamphlet says "Excessive speed and lack of care at junctions are the biggest causes of accidents to SGB vehicles" I now know where to keep a sharp lookout. Thanks for the warning.
• £229 collection
As if there was not already a vast store of published material on Britain's integration with Europe, a Brighton firm (Harvester Press, Grand Parade) is issuing a 22,000-page collection of "primary source material".
Among other things it contains statements by 69 British pressure groups and other organizations — banks, trade unions and the Press, for instance, between 1945 and 1972.
Anyone fancying a really intensive "goggle" will need to know that it costs £229 — and will be updated and enlarged annually!
• Oldies and Newies
I don't intend to become a postbox for veteran vehicle information but for those operators who are interested in bygone transport as well as modern vehicles I offer the following notes which have come my way.
June 30 and July 1 will be this year's dates for the Sudbury Mammoth Rallye, with hot-air balloons as well as' veteran trucks and passenger vehicles. The Marsh Gibbon vintage and veteran working rally (near Bicester, Oxon) is on September 1 and 2, with lots of working steam power.
'A register of Thornycroft vehicles has been formed by P. J. Davies, 6, St George's Road, Badshot Lea, Farnham, Surrey. And the Commercial Vehicle Index is expanding its scope. Details from P. Galton, 29 Kirkdale, Sydenham, London SE26 4BT.
• Derailed
It had to happen.
On March 8 in the Albert Hall the National Federation of Women's Institutes was due to debate a resolution aimed at getting more traffic back on to the railways. But the conference had to be cancelled — because of the rail strike.
I gather that FTA secretary Garry Turvey who was to have put the road transport viewpoint, resisted the temptation to send the secretary a telegram reading: "Assume motion defeated nem con".