bird's eye view by the Hawk
Page 53
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• Cash flow!
The bus industry doesn't make so much money that it can afford to lose any when it's actually in the kitty, and Guy Neely's paper on money at last week's PRTA conference seemed to have stirred people to tell terrible tales of cash in peril.
One general manager told me he'd just been quizzing his pay clerks about the two-key-holder system for the cash safe because some bags of money had gone missing; he discovered to his horror that the safe had not been locked for three months because the keys had been lost. But not to worry, said the clerk, because we now keep the money in the other safe, and the key for that hasn't been lost. "See, it hangs here on the wall just over the safe."
Collapse of gm.
• The one that got away
Two other money stories concerned "economical" home-made cash safes constructed by fleet engineers. In one case the construction appeared vast enough to defeat any professional cracksmen, yet cash was mysteriously disappearing.
The answer came when someone with a deductive turn of mind started asking why one of the night staff sometimes carried a fishing rod. Yes — the do-it-yourself Fort Knox turned out to have a little hole in the top, way above normal vision, and the compleat angler was spending happy nights fishing for money bags.
In the other story, the engineer had built an equally impressive strongroom of steel and concrete and all looked well until the gm on his tour of inspection asked where the little wooden door under the stairs in the hq building led to. It turned out that the flimsy door to the understair cupboard gave direct access to the back of the great vault!
• Old hat
Talking buses, many eyes in the psv world are now on the GLC to see how it reacts to London Transport's "unilateral declaration of independence" in asking for a fares increase, the Council having pledged itself to a cheap-fares system.
So it was with more than normal interest that I spotted the following while going through a copy of CM looking for something else:—
"The Liberal and Radical Press has always strained every nerve to show that the London County Council's trams are not rate-aided, and these papers have more recently been protesting against the action of the Municipal Reform Party in securing the application of an audit on commercial lines to the LCC tramway accounts.... The Progressive Party is animated by the belief that it should provide the working man with transport facilities at cost price. If its eagerness to advance a Socialistic propaganda has resulted in a slight, or even in a considerable, overstepping of the mark, by all means let us have the truth ascertained without delay. . .
That was over 60 years ago — the quotation is from CM March 28 1907. And CM at the time was worried that London's omnibus companies might have been "competing with a system of passenger transport that has been appreciably subsidized out of the rates . .".
III Job lot
Buses are creating comment in the States, too. "Fifth Avenue could become the equivalent of one long bus with a horn at one end and an exhaust pipe at the other," says a leading article in the New York Times — that is, it explains, "if the proliferation of express bus services from the outer fringes of the Bronx and Queens into midtown Manhattan continues, and if the same increasingly clogged routes are designated to handle this traffic.
And I wondered how long the passenger transport industry could escape some equivalent term of opprobrium for its vehicles to that of juggernauts. The NIT leads the way: "The behemoth buses," its says, "are already as thick as taxis." A behemoth, b the way, is the animal, probably a hippc potamus, described in the Book of Job.
• Disbelief
Haulier W. Hamilton, of Kinglassie, Fife is one of several readers who've writtei to query the half-million and million mile a year truck utilization ascribed to Tor Mannix of Ryder, USA, in answering question from a Dutch operator at a recen Continental seminar (CM June 1). He say he can well believe there were "cries c disbelief" from the delegates, and point out that even the example of a road traii running treble-shifted for 20 hours ou of 24, at 70 mph on motorways, couli barely manage fin miles (70 X 20 X 36:
511,000) let alone lm miles in a yea' Having bearded our reporter in his den he ruefully admits that he must hay. misheard part of the answer — whicl dealt at greater length with both vehicli lives and annual mileages than was coverec in the published snippet.
Sorry, Mr Hamilton (and Mr Mannix an all). For "annual mileage" please reac "vehicle life".
• Mammoth tyme again
Just a quickie. Historic commercial vehicles a great wadge of steam-powered machinery hot-air balloons, horse coaches, you-name it-they've-got-it at the Sudbury Mammotl Old Tyme Rallye, June 30 and July 1, a Melton Hall, Sudbury, Suffolk.