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bird's eye view bytheHawk • Rail fan
Page 53
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I have not met many engineers in road transport circles who are at all sympathetic to the problems of their opposite numbers in British Rail. An exception is Harry Taylor, SELNEC PTE's group development engineer, who is also one of the few road men who has had to study rail technology. Harry, of course, has been involved in development work for the PTE's much vaunted, but now shelved, Pic-Vic underground rail line. He reckons that engineering problems on the railways often reauire far more complex solutions than similar ones on road vehicles. He cites as an example the sophisticated techniques necessary to ensure simultaneous braking on all the carriages on a long train.
Incidentally, SELNEC is not taking Minister for Transport Industries, John Peyton's rejection of its rail scheme lying down. It is sending its lavishly eauipped display caravan to all three party conferences to lobby MPs and is considering mounting a full-scale pressure campaign.
• Chillier still
Be grateful, though, that while transport sometimes seems a pawn of politics in the UK it never reaches the extreme situation which has now developed in Chile.
I don't know whether you've been following the dispute there, about which I wrote a couple of weeks ago, but by this week the affair was turning distinctly nasty.
In an attempt to get the hauliers — mostly owner-drivers — to call off their month-old strike (which has already cost the Minister of Public Works and Transport his job), President Allende's government offered to assign the Confederation of Lorry Owners 1300 new lorries and 2000 taxis. When this didn't work, the lorries were allocated instead to regional groups of hauliers who are "honestly ready to work"; and police protection will be given to these, while being withdrawn from the lorry parks where the CLO's trucks are held.
In the meantime, there have been terrorist attacks on blackleg lorry operators; the strike has been condemned as "seditious"; and the Chilean government has decided to revoke the legal status of the CLO (Chile's RHA).
AU of which is made more complicated by the left wing/right wing confrontation which has brought such odd bedfellows as shopkeepers, dentists and doctors out on strike in support of the hauliers.
• No spark Protagonists of electric vehicle propulsion will find little to encourage optimism about new light traction power systems in one place where they might have expected it — in a report, The British Battery Industry and Europe, just put out by the Haddon-Oldham Group, of Market Harborough. Perhaps that just goes to show how honest and restrained the report is.
Of power for electric cars (and, by inference, light vans), it says: "The many alternative systems proposed are all toe heavy, too complex, too costly and sometimes too dangerous, for general use on the roads. There seems unlikely to be a serious practical competitor to the lead-acid battery for a number of years to come."
Still, it does foresee wider use of batteryelectrics for local deliveries, for urban taxis and for buses — in which, of course, we're already seeing some developments.
I'm afraid that my weakness for devilment led me to smile Quite unpardonably at the report's statement that power cuts in Europe could lead to thousands of pounds worth of real-time computer information being scrambled like an egg — to guard against which, apparently, there is great reliance on the simple old standby battery!
• Let 'ern run
We hear a lot these days about complicated techniaues for diagnosing faults in engines. But are they really necessary? I was talking to one bus engineer recently who told me that he thought people were too ready to take a vehicle out of service because of some supposed defect.
When he began work for one of the smaller municipal fleets in the North West he was told about a problem bus. Despite the engine being stripped twice, it still made a funny noise. Having ascertained the fuel and oil consumption were normal, and that the bus was performing normally, my man sent it back into service. "If there's anything wrong with it, there will soon be a breakdown," he told the somewhat peeved mechanics. The bus was still running per fectly — but noisely — five years later when he left the fleet!
• It never shines. . .
Canadian hauliers are, I hear, having a bumper summer — in fact quite embarrassingly so. The industry was already showing fast recovery from a period of very poor economic activity when the national rail strike was called — and road operators everywhere were deluged with offers of traffic.
A rail strike hits a country like Canada harder than it does Britain — not only because of the vast distances involved, but also because trucks normally handle only 55 per cent of Canada's freight, compared with around 85 per cent in the UK. So when the railways stop, the traffic really spills over in a big way.
Now, Canadian hauliers may not actually be going around with long faces, but they are poo-pooing suggestions that they're coining money. Running trucks seven days a week has sent maintenance costs soaring, and so has the overtime pay for scarce driving staff, they say. Still . . . if they're running at 100 per cent utilization—as some say they are — they're exactly losing money on the deal, are they?
IN Hire purpose
"You have no expert staff to question heavy charges for replacement gearboxes, clutches etc. Maintenance costs soar above budget. Do you suspect it happens in your firm?"
Cries of "yes!" are likely to emanate from more than a few transport throats — in answering just one of the uncomfortably near-to-home Questions on Ryder Truck Rental's latest promotional package. It's a questionnaire designed to look like a contest, and called The Company Transport Board Game; and it's going out to transport and distribution directors.
Do you 'think it is coincidence that the answer to all the graphically posed problems is hire or rental? Hmmm. . .