bird's eye
Page 31
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viewby the Hawk
• Tunnel arithmetic
How about some maths to bring you sharply out of the Christmas haze? Dick Marsh's estimate to the International Union of Railways that the Channel Tunnel could take 5m tons of freight in its first year of operation (CM December 17) may in any case persuade transport men to exercise their arithmetic. If 2m tons goes through in rail containers on the Freightliner model this works out (I think) at about 12 trains a day on the basis of 10 tons average load per container and 450-ton trainloads —15 x 3 x 20ft containers per train.
The I m tons expected to be roll-on/roll-off traffic ferried through the tunnel from portal to portal presumably means lorry traffic, carried piggy-back. Assuming that the rail-container traffic moves on 365 days a year but that lorries are carried on only 300 days a year — because of weekend restrictions and so on — given average loads of 20 tons there would be 170 loads a day taking up 5100 ft of train space approximately. or perhaps eight trainloads.
Some lorry or trailer trains would originate — if the damn tunnel is ever built — up-country, but the fascinating logistical question is how tong the trains would take to load.
My colleague John Darker has elicited from Raymond flutter. joint directorgeneral of French Railways, that since cars can be loaded at an average of 2.7sec per car it is not unreasonable to expect lorries to be loaded on wagons within 15 to 17sec per vehicle.
Operational research boffins will doubtless have much fun before the grand tunnel opening, demonstrating that theory and practice can be reconciled. These things are always fine in theory, but real life can be so very different. The multiplicity of lorry loads and the possibility that the odd vehicle or trailer will be out of gauge, not to mention the strong chance that drivers or loaders may be quaffing tea in the canteen or obeying a call of nature when t'whistle blows for train loading, suggests that the 17-second guesstimate may be wildly wrong. No doubt our railway friends will point out the errors in my arithmetic!
• Head of steam
I'm not at all surprised to learn that Mini designer Sir Alec Issigonis will not really be retiring on December 31 even though he has reached the official age to do so. You cannot suddenly turn off such a flow of
energy and ideas, and British Leyland has had the good sense to realize it. BLMC is therefore bending the rules so that he may continue, as the official word puts it, -working with a team of bright young engineers who are devoting their time solely to dreaming up original solutions to the engineering problems we shall have to be solving over the next decade or so".
Vintage hauliers may shed a nostalgic tear to learn that one of the projects now being investigated by Sir Alec's advanced design department is steam propulsion.
• Magnificent seven
Struggling to find the press material and letters in between the calendars and Christmas cards (thanks, everybody!) we came upon a cry for help which almost qualified for that hoary old question: Is this a record?
We have had drivers seeking advice about record-keeping when they work for two, or even sometimes three, employers but this chap not only drives part-time for seven different operators — he also has a separate log book issued by each of them!
He was worried that he might be breaking the law. Getting him back on to the straight and narrow is going to take some unscrambling.
• Black marks
The armchair critics have been very free with their comments about poor lorry brakes being responsible for motorway pile-ups; but the picture of the car driver as a shining, guaranteed Ig stopper is hardly borne out by the exhibits in the black museum which brake lining manufacturers Mintex keep at their proving ground in Sherburn-in-Elmet, near York.
Quite apart from the clever brigade who thought they would save money by using odd bits of shoe leather instead of proper liners, there are some classic way-out examples of do-it-yourself. Like the Jaguar whose owner carved replacement brake pads from wood for his discs!
• The numbers game
Once upon a time a calendar was simply a means of telling the date at a glance. Then they added pictures. Then coloured pictures. Then pictures of the sort which turned the glance into a long, lingering daydream. 'Now the calendar is a cult. Pirelli really started it all with that girlie product of — was it 1968? It became a PR image-builder. This year there has been a flood of business calendars, of surprising diversity. Some, like Air Products and BRSL, have chosen as subjects the industries they serve, and there arc plenty of the more traditional landscapes and national landmarks. For the novel touch I rather like Exide's idea of depicting markets around the world, from a vegetable stall in Samarkand to a barrow in Soho. Avon is one of those which has gone to town with the full PR treatment, but as a sheer publicity exercise Pirelli still has the edge. Its calendar launching, aimed at national coverage, represented an investment of L57,000 and was accompanied by the issue of a full press pack describing how the whole thing was set up, planned, photographed and produced.
At the risk of being accused of kicking a gift horse in the teeth, I'm bound to ask whether it was worth it. As a publicity exercise, perhaps, but I really can't get very excited about a collection of very sadlooking girls in a drab misty-brown world.
• Crossed umbrellas?
But then I'm just a simple old cynic who is still looking for those numbers so that I can tell which day it is. To get the full flavour of the image-building calendar you need to see inside the designer's mind, which in Pirelli's case has been spelt out like this:— The Pirelli girl has changed her image. She has shaken the sand out of her long sunbleached hair, and become a woman of the night, a hothouse bloom, languid, mysterious, pale from the heat, with bruised sad eyes and mournful red lips. Her totem is the moon, wandering wistful and companionless across the skies. She has become one ((If those women you only see in dreams, or disappearing into expensive hotels in a trail of Diorissima, or flashing by smothered in furs in the back of a huge silent car.
She has the sullen pent-up beauty sung about by poets, she is Deirdre of the Sorrows, Mariana of the Mooted Grange, Penelope waiting for Ulysses, Helen, anguished yet passive, waiting for Troy to burn.
The whole calendar has a dreamlike quality, as though a bygone traveller had suddenly stumbled on some deserted chateau, pulled aside the nettles and brambles choking the doorway and, wandering down the corridors, peered through the keyholes of the great locked rooms.
What he saw troubles and confuses the senses, it is all part of the male fantasy of how women spend the hours when their lovers are away, talking about clothes, trying on hats in their underwear, going for drives, trailing through leafstrewn woods, waiting for the post or telephone, while the metronome on the piano ticks away at useless time.
The results have a magic, a texture you would think could only be caught by the painter's brush. You can almost smell the unstoppered phials of scent, hear the snap of a garter on a bare thigh, feel the softness of foxfur flung around a pair of ivory shoulders.
Executives have beet known to cross rolled umbrellas at dawn for the sake of a Pirelli girl on their walls. This year, we hope, will be no exception.