bird's eye view by the Hawk
Page 28
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• Not so wizard
The news that London Transport is getting rid of all 555 of its 36ft single-deck MBseries buses comes as no great surprise, though it is a pretty dramatic indication of the change in thinking about urban buses. Of the 900-odd new vehicles which LT is ordering, over 800 will be double-deckers.
The MBs are going five years earlier than planned, and it seems there will be few tears shed over their departure. From the start they met passenger resistance — with epithets like "cattle truck" flying about in suburban quarters, and their 36ft x 8ft dimensions have not endeared them to drivers, especially in the central area. In fact the Red Arrows have done a pretty good job of shifting vast numbers of commuters to and from mainline stations, but the public in the suburbs has not taken to the standee idea — and motorists will be glad to see an end to those long waits behind the friendly red monsters standing at stops while a patient queue hands over its fares.
The MB, MBA and MBS single-deckers which are being pensioned off are the AEC Swift/Merlin family built to LT requirements, and have not had the happiest mechanical history either bodywise or mechanically.
LT News, the fleet staff newspaper, says the early retirement results from mechanical unreliability and the difficulty of getting spares. To have kept the buses in service until the early 1980s would have cost at least £1.7m for new power packs.
I gather, too, that the difficulty of operating 36ft-long single-deckers in central London is a factor, and so is the problem of access to garages, and manoeuvring within them.
• Made in Japan
If you see Jap heavy trucks running on British roads with UK registrations in the near future, it won't indicate that they're on sale here (yet!), though you might be forgiven for thinking so, in view of the inroads which the Japanese are making in the domestic car market.
I hear that a Worcestershire company which distributes construction machinery is now dealing in Japanese-built examples, and the manufacturer has asked them to switch to Jap heavy trucks to transport the machines — and has even volunteered to pay for the UK distributor to go to Japan to select the trucks.
Now he's busy with the catalogues.
• Romantic East
Leo Goodenough lives in Pennsylvania Avenue, Cheltenham, an appropriately international sounding address for a man who takes off for foreign parts at the drop of an order form. In fact he's one of 10 full-time drivers employed by Holmes Transport (Cheltenham) to deliver British vehicles to faraway places.
Not all the jobs are as exotic as that might lead you to think. One of his latest was a 2500-mile overland trip to Persia with a sewage disposal vehicle for the Iranian Navy (would you believe?). Since the vehicle would only do about 40 mph it was hardly a meteoric ride.
Even so, it was quicker than going by sea round the Cape, and Mr Goodenough did Amersham to Bandar Abbas in a fortnight. Warned of the oddness of menus as he progressed farther East, he took a supply of tinned food and lived al fresco or in the cab.
Surprisingly, overland delivery can be cheaper as well as quicker than sea freight, and I guess Holmes must be happy that the late President Nasser (or Lord Avon, depending on your view of the affair) closed the Suez Canal.
• Perks
Isn't it hard to get away from transport, even on holiday? During a visit to Gigha ("God's Island" in Gaelic, they tell me) my colleague John Darker came across a large household removal, with several vehicles of B. Mundell, of Glasgow and Islay in attendance.
JD had got to the island in a 31-seat motor boat from the Kintyre mainland. How did the large removal vans get over?
It appeared that a special run with a car ferry from Tarbert was arranged for the removers. The valuable furniture and effects were loaded after some precious articles had been specially valued and cosseted by the staff of Christie's, the fine art auctioneers.
Removals crews and valuers, I gather, lived royally for several days on the sumptuous fruit from the mansion's kitchen garden. I knew there must be a few perks in the removals business. . . .
• Big mouth!
In Scotland road builders are thrifty chaps; they think nothing of slicing off the entire surface of a 20ft-wide road for lengths of several miles if it suits them. Rocks and potholes abound. And this within a few miles of that over-populated place (in summer) Oban.
At Culzean Castle, in Ayrshire, there are interesting mementoes of MacAdam, the pioneer road builder, who hailed from a nearby village. In a textbook published long before the internal combustion engine was invented, MacAdam insisted that the largest stone on the top dressing of a road should be no more than one inch in diameter — mouth size, in fact. Apparently, to circumvent this inconvenient rule of thumb (or mouth) one labourer in a road gang was always employed with a gigantic mouth!
One of my colleagues, who once had the misfortune to run over a football-sized rock in a Minivan, think's MacAdam's textbook should be re-issued to modern road builders, though he admits that his hunk of rock fell from an anonymous tipper.