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TIME TRAVELLER
Page 26
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Our anachronistic review in celebration of the universal law...what goes around, comes around.
75 years ago: r May 1928
Winston Churchill said in his Budget speech that the state should hold the balance between road and rail transport. If road vehicles inflicted more damage on the roads than they paid for, it was unfair to the community. He said that the Road Fund and road authorities were spending over f5om a year on roads, which were already the best in the world. It was therefore not in the public interest to spend many additional millions over the next few years if the result would be to make the railway system, which represented thousands of millions of British capital and employed 700,000 men, prematurely obsolete. He went on to announce that there would be a reduction of licence duties on lighter goods vehicles, and a rebate of 20% for all heavy goods vehicles fitted with pneumatic instead of solid tyres.
50 years ago: i May 1953
The director general of the newly-formed Baghdad Passenger Transport Board, Sayid Mumtax Al-LImari met with the London Transport Executive to seek advice on reducing congestion in the Iraqi capital, where peak traffic had become worse than in London. Explanations for the growth in traffic were that, as well as a shortage of buses in the region, the suburbs were a short distance from the business and entertainment centre. Baghdad decided that one solution would be to introduce double-decker buses; it placed an order for 20 Regent Mark in left handdrive chassis with Park Royal double-deck bodies.
25 years ago: 26 August 1977 Charles Bailey, president of the Vehicles Builders and Repairers Association, revealed that there were plans to import ready-bodied commercial vehicles into Britain from Japan. So far, there was no threat to British bodybuilders as only a few vehicles had been imported, but he urged the government to control imports. Cheshire MP Gwynneth Dunwoody was also seeking assurances over the threat of competition from Hino, which was building vehicles only a few miles away from her constituents—Poden—in Liverpool.