• Last week, my esteemed colleagues on the news desk
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published a story on Alan Hawkes, the hero lorry driver who saved the lives of many children in the Zeebrugge ferry disaster. Hawkes won the Transport and General Workers' Union highest honour — the workers' Victoria Cross — for his outstanding bravery.
Due to a printing fault, the article was published minus its last line. It is only just that our homage to the heroes and the victims of the disaster be properly recorded and in order to do that, here is the final paragraph, complete with missing line: "In the midst of all this chaos, that child had a calming effect," said Hawkes. "She just sat there on my knee with a smile on her face. She never cried. She was just a nipper."
• The chaps at Michelin obviously know what operators get up to. In the tyre manufacturer's latest technical guide, underneath a picture of each tread pattern there is a brief description of its use. All very normal stuff — but wait. Under the section marked for its XR off-road model Michelin states that it is ideal "where massacre conditions prevail".
History does not record which of the world's greatest conflicts were influenced by the fitting of XRs — but its probably fair to assume that General Custer was still fitting Taiwanese remoulds on his wagon when he got his final short back and sides.
• One of Europe's best collections of old commercial vehicles is being kept behind closed doors because bureaucrats and local politicians cannot agree on who owns a museum site.
More than 100 buses, coaches and trams, most in working order, are languishing in a shed outside Bradford. 21 million of ratepayers' money and 12ha of land have been set aside to build a museum/theme park, but two councils and a government body can't agree on what to do with the land.
Kirldees Council, which inherited part of the site from the defunct West Yorkshire County Council, wants to allow the trust which runs the museum to open it to the public. Bradford Council, which owns most of the land, fears a heavy subsidy for the museum, which it says it cannot afford, and talks about turning it into factory space.
The West Yorkshire Transport museum welcomes organised parties any time and opens to the public one Sunday afternoon a month — but even with 400 volunteers and a society of museum-supporters there are not enough funds to open the museum permanently.
• North-west London suburbia was rocked to its foundations last week with the news that the 30-year-old Neasden roundabout was to be torn up to make way for a nature reserve.
This splendid post-war concrete artifice, home to sparrows and glue-sniffers, round which lorries, cars and buses trundle daily on their way to the North Circular, will soon be no more. In its place will be a drab £20,000 suburban wildlife sanctuary. Shocked local lorry driver Sid Bonkers says he is "shocked" by the news. "Our house has overlooked the Neasden roundabout for decades. Me and the missus don't want to wake up and have a great 250acre country park facing us. These ecologists — there's only one language they understand. String 'em up I say."
• Terry Marsh, world lightwelterweight undefeated boxing champion, has joined an HGV training organisation whose policy it is to let no one it trains be defeated by the test. "Should anyone attending a HGV course with us fail the test, we guarantee to give additional training at no additional cost until they pass," says Amraf-Coles, the training school.
Marsh has become commercial director of the company after experiences with bad motoring accidents while in the fire brigade led him to play an active part in the promotion of road safety.
• After the tragic news that Dafs Paris-Dakar rally team had lost Kees van Loewezijn, who died in a high-speed desert accident, it is good to have some cheerful news from Leyland Dd.
Daf employees Frans van Asperen and Henk Voets were recently given the George Stephenson Award by the British-based Institution of Mechanical Engineers, for their joint paper entitled "Optimisation of the Dynamic Behaviour of a Cib, Bus Structure".
• When you go off on a Friday night to paint the town red it is understood that you are off for a good time and the painting is just a figure of ' speech. To go off and paint the garden red is, on the other hand, a less subtle description of what happened last week to a family in Gloucester.
The unnecessary decoration happened after a lorry went out of control, crashed through the garden wall and spilled 10,000 gallons of animal blood all over the lawn. Bleeding trucks!