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bird's eye view bythe Hawk
Page 52
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• The link
Road transport testimonials are paraded in the oddest places. At an official reception by the Berlin Senate at the Charlottenburg Palace last week, for example, a spokesman, Dr Karl K6nig, reminded his audience that since the Berlin airlift practically all the food and raw materials necessary to sustain life in West Berlin had been taken in by road "and not a screw lost in 20 years".
The audience was in fact composed of delegates to the Berlin congress on transport and distribution — CM'S John Darker among them — and they heard about a familiar transport problem in the unusual Berlin situation: the raw materials needed to keep West Berlin's industries going are four times the volume of finished goods exported from the city, so traffic is not exactly balanced.
At another reception on the 18th floor of the Axel Springer building the night view over both sides of The Wall showed that among the high buildings which seem to be a catching disease in the city was a massive complex for the East German trade unions.
• Propaganda tours
The congress provided an opportunity for delegates to tour both sides of the city, and the official guides in both bus tours were patently propagandist for their respective governments. The wall — which runs for 20km through the city and is 50km long in all — is a human horror, but no one on either side seemed to expect its early disappearance.
Oddly enough, John was told at the EEC hq in Brussels recently that for practiCal purposes East Germany is part of the Common Market: there is tremendous trade between the two sectors despite the different currencies and vast political gulf. Is it even a remote possibility that the Common Market and Comecon — the iron curtain equivalent — could come together one day to form an enormous trading area? It could produce some remarkable transport results.
Going through Checkpoint Charlie was an experience, reports JD. As a journalist his passport excited the interest of the East German girl who came aboard the bus to record the monetary status of the congress trippers; she was worried lest JD had anything technical about his person, like a tape recorder, and she disappeared with the passport for about twenty minutes to make quite sure that CM was a respectable journal, not given to anarchy or any such nonsense.
Visitors may freely take pictures once well over the border but not, on pain of camera confiscation at least, at the tank-trapped border. The no-man's land between East and West is of variable width — in the field at the back of what was Berlin's Whitehall is Adolfs bunker, beneath a sizeable mound. No visitors get to it: no neo-Nazi cults are wanted by either side.
• Sharing the transport
Apparently the entire Berlin local rail system is run by the East Berlin transport authority, as arranged by the Potsdam Conference many years ago. Some bus operations in the Western half of the city are privately run and there are financial relationships between the East and West bus managements. In the Eastern sector, articulated buses seem quite widely used, supplementing trams in doubleand treble-car combinations. Public transport is a dire necessity in the city since it is laid out on the grand scale; Marx Engles square, says JD, must be one of the biggest open city spaces in the world. The roads in East Berlin were laid out by planners with motor transport in mind. The East German guide said that transport employees work a 42t-hour week with no overtime allowed. Environmental hazards like noisy airliners affect East and West Berliners impartially. When one congress delegate remarked to the guide: "We have to suffer aircraft noise, too; we have to put up with it", the guide retorted: "Hmm, you could shoot them down"!
• Poetic president
The Chartered Institute of Transport's anniversary luncheon threatens to burst the bounds of the Connaught Rooms — this year's event, held on Tuesday, attracted over 700 members and guests. Nice to see a growing proportion of road transport faces among them. Nice, too, of president Dan Pettit to say a special word about the part the Press plays in making transport things happen.
He was able to come up with a topical jingle, which went something like this:— Remember, remember, 0 Institute member, Gunpowder, treason and plot;
But now we'll remember the Month oj November For Pompidou, Brandt and that lot.
Hastening to add that he meant "that lot" in the mostfriendly way.
The president's inaugural address, which we reported a couple of weeks back, wa; obviously intended to set the tone and approach of his term of office. On Tuesday he affirmed that the theme of his presidency is going to be the reconciliation of gooc commercial practice with good citizenship Dan admitted that he'd been disappointec when the MoT lost its separate identity, bu now he wasn't so sure; he felt that the Doi under Peter Walker was reaching ou beyond the limits of the commercial state tc the wider needs of a community concernec with quality. Which made a ver■ appropriate introduction to the principa guest — Peter Walker himself, hotfoo from the State opening of Parliament.
• Happy returns
This seems to be the season for returninl travellers. At the CIT lunch Dan Petti remarked on the recent return from thi States of Richard Marsh "who succeedinl in convincing the Americans that thi Boston Tea Party could be paid for by th equity in Wells Fargo".
Meanwhile I've just been hearing from returned traveller about the visit by 31 PVOA members to the Continent last weet mainly to see the impressive Van Hoc coach works. Seems that the trip develope an atmosphere of busmen's holiday whe the party's foreign coach, supplied by Bruges operator, came to rest with a broke suspension. It was a nearly new vehicle, toc A salutary introduction to the Commo Market?