COUNTRY COUSIN
Page 31
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Our Roadrunner Runnerthon has been down on the farm, where East Sussex farmer Vera Garnett has been using it to haul scrap, silage and sacks of feed.
• Vera Garnett has been running her farm in East Sussex for 15 years. Like most farmers, she runs a small truck to shift everything from straw to sheep to and from market.
During the past fortnight, she has been helped by Commercial Motor and Leyland Daf's Runnerthon Roadrunner fitted with a Lucas electric crane and York dropside body. She says it has been ideal for hauling bales of wool and silage.
The R-registration Bedford 10-tonne TK, which Garnett bought seven years ago used to be a brewery lorry, but she had it fitted with a demountable cattle box which she uses to carry sheep.
Now the vehicle, which has done over 80,000km, is being put out to grass and Garnett is in the market for a newer secondhand truck. She is considering a Roadrunner if she can find one fitted to take a cattle container.
RURAL ROADS
"We need it for animals," she says, "hut it also needs to come off when we are carrying straw or hay." She wants one with larger wheels too, if possible, as she feels this improves stability on rutted rural roads.
Garnett, who holds a restricted operator's licence which allows her to haul her own goods, says the 10,000km she travels in her truck each year does not justify buying a new truck.
"With a farm it's a huge expense," she says. Most of her trips are to market in Ashford, 42km away, although occasionally she goes as far as Guildford or even north Wales. She has done 1,000km in
two days. Some weeks she is on the road four days out of six.
During other weeks, the truck does not move from her drive. But Garnett, based in Staplecross, says owning a lorry is cheaper and less bother than hiring one when she is busy.
She found the Roadrunner economical and manoeuvrable with a good wheel lock. The only problem was that there was little room for storage or for a dog, she says.
Her Bedford has a platform behind the passenger seat. She feels Leyland Daf is too generous in the foot room it gives passengers, and feels it would be better used by pulling the seat forward slightly.
Garnett, who moved to Sussex from Ascot with her farming parents in 1946, Lives with her sister, an air hostess. She took over the running of the farm fully in 1975, although "all the farmers in the area help each other out," she says.
Garnett, who has 120 sheep, 17 cows, about 30 calves and a bull on her 20hectare farm, used to run a Land Rover and trailer ("probably highly dangerous") and before that a Bedford and a Morris "in the days of petrol".
]For the last stage of the Runnerthon, our Roadrunner moves back into general haulage with Allport Freight of London. El by Murdo Morrison