New Zealand firm showed the way
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JUST to prove that there are not many things new under the sun, fuel-carrying flatbed drawbartrailers of the type made in Finland by Saalisti (CM, December 20) have been used for many years by the South Island, New Zealand, firm of Transport (Nelson) on the 110 kilometre Nelson-Blenheim run, and others.
The rather restrictive Antipodean legislation means that these trailers are somewhat smaller than their Finnish counterparts, and as I remember it, the trucks themselves were not converted to provide tankage. Incidentally, an impecunious Government long ago accepted the impossibility of driving a rail link through the hilly country between Nelson and Blenheim, and declared the road over which those tank flatbeds travel to be a "National Railway" with the same freight rates as would be applied by NZ Railways. This presumably makes that route one of the few in the world where one might meet an F88 or Kenworth labouring under the misapprehension that it is a locomotive ...
ALLAN WINN Engineering Today London W1