* Colour supplement
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Like love and marriage, or the horse and carriage, by-pass openings and speeches just naturally go together. But last week's ceremony when Robert Brown, MoT Joint Parliamentary Secretary, cut the tape on the new Alfreton-South Normanton highway had a colourful supplement in the form of a cavalcade of transport. Derbyshire County Council had gone to great pains to get together 70 vehicles, including a 1782 fourhorse stage coach.
The oldest commercial vehicle was the 1908 Daimler charabanc (with inclined floor !) owned by Barton Transport Ltd. Then there was P. Van Houten's 1928 Foden steam tractor, believed to be the only C-type in existence, W. G. Pyatt's 1935 Leyland Hippo, and a 1938 North Western's Bristol single-decker, still with its Manchester destination line in place. Its present power unit, older than the vehicle, is stated to have clocked up 1,844,000 miles.
The three-mile by-pass is one of the first of the proposed "strategy routes" to be opened since the publication of the Green Paper, Roads for the Future, and is the largest county highway project yet undertaken by Derbyshire.