DEAR SIR
Page 45
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SAD REMINDER
• Your recent editiorial "Knights of the road" prompted me to put pen to paper (CM 10-25 July).
On 10 July 1989 at 22:00hrs on the M I motorway near junction 16 northbound, my brother Harold and our 18year-old mechanic Andrew Elliott were towing one of our trucks back to our depot after a breakdown in London.
Travelling at 35-40mph in the slow lane, they were hit from behind by a French driver with a Belgian Volvo artic travelling at 60mph. The impact of the crash caused our two slow-moving vehicles to jack-knife, and pushed them down an embankment.
The disabled vehicle then broke away from the tow bar and overturned, killing my brother and our young mechanic instantly and injuring our other driver who was driving the disabled vehicle.
The French driver later admitted that he had been reading his map while driving and was seen from behind by witnesses in a car wandering over the motorway before the crash.
The sad and tragic news was told to me and my family at 03:00hrs on 11 July by Northampton police, I was then instructed to drive on to Northampton General Hospital mortuary to identify the bodies of my brother and Andrew.
How I wished that French driver could have accompanied me on that identification, to see the death and damage he had caused with his reckless, stupid driving tactics, and also to see how our families were affected by this devastating human loss. As the driver did not get a prison sentance, he is probably out on the road today. R Horton, Dudley, West Midlands,
BRIDGE THE GAP
• Well done to your editor Brian Weatherley for telling the faceless wonders at the Department of Transport to get their act together and publish a countryside listing of weighbridges.
This piecemeal approach with some counties doing a good job with accurate lists and others not bothering is a joke. Your magazine has plenty of stories about inaccurate weighbridges and hauliers getting discharges for due diligence, so when will the "powers that be" see that it all wastes a lot of time and give us the network of weighbridges we need to stay inside the law?
S Hillier
Marston Green, Birmingham.
TRAINING STANDARDS • I am writing to show my support for the work Commercial Motor has already done on training.
I am a HGV instructor of 17 years' experience and I get very concerned about the training being given to potential HGV drivers.
The standard of training has dropped to rock bottom, as we have read in previous issues of Commercial Motor,
Edo not profess to being the best, but I take a pride in my job. I feel it is a very important one, being able to pass on your years of experience to a
trainee by teaching him to think and act defensively and yet being positive in their driving at the same time. But in some cases this method of instructional training does not seem to be put into practice.
It seems sufficient for the instructor to just sit there and let the trainee drive as long as they are safe enough. No techniques of driving, and to be honest, very little actual training is given after they are able to handle the HGV.
After being out on the road with a trainee, they turn to you and say they have been training all week long and why have they not been told and shown the methods that I have asked them do do before now — and yet we instructors are all shown and taught more or less the same kind of instructional methods from either Shrewsbury or Livingston (in Scotland) MOTEC. To be casual in the methods of instruction is all wrong and that is why I think there are so many bad „crashes, loss of control, insecure loads, and loss of life due to lack of training given to HGV trainees.
If a trainee is taught to drive a lorry as a lorry driver, then he or she will pass a test at any test station in the country. But, if he is only taught to pass a test, as is the case in today's training, then that's all he will know about HGV driving — just how to go round the test routes and handle the lorry. No techniques of driving, no driver experience from the instructor.
To drive an empty lorry is one thing, but to put 23 or 25 tonnes onto the back of a very powerful machine and to entrust it with someone who has no experience means you have created a lethal combination which can and does kill, if not handled in the correct manner. Driver training should not stop at passing a driving test or answering some questions for an examiner; it should continue on to loading, roping and sheeting and so on.
It seems to me and also may to other people connected with HGV training that the best training was given when the "driver's mate" and "trailer mate" were being used in the transport industry. That was when the mate learned all the techniques of the driving, loading and sheeting and so on — it was like a lorry driver's apprenticeship until he came of age to drive a lorry for himself, after passing his test.
Most firms employed drivers' mates, had a small lorry, such as a three-tonner, and they would have the "mate" drive one of these vehicles to start with and as he got older he moved to bigger vehicles and so on until he passed his Class I. I think myself it was a good apprenticeship for the haulage industry.
Don't take me wrong, the DTp HGV training is very good, but it is abused in a lot of cases by "cowboy" instructors or by instructors who couldn't care less as long as they pick up their wage packets at the end of the week.
Until the DTp gets its act together and gets a registration of all qualified HGV instructors or HGV driver training companies there will always be a serious problem in HGV driver training.
Having mentioned drivers' mates, the young driver scheme was a very good way of developing an HGV driver. I had some experience in training the young drivers at the Hull and District Road Transport Training School, and it was a very good scheme and should never have been dropped out of training.
As I said at the beginning of this letter I don't profess to being a superstar instructor, just one who is very concerned about the standard of the training being given today. The roads and the motorways are just about full of drivers with very little, or no experience, and it should not be this way.
We the instructors should be able to put a lot, or at least some of that road experience we possess into the student driver Wore he starts out on his or her new career in road transport.
M F Jackson,