Govt. Grant Aids Sunderland-London Service
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A GOVERNMENT grant worth £6,250 1-1 has enabled Cawthorn and Sinclair Ltd. to start building a £25,000 combined workshop and office block at their head office in Birtley, Co, Durham. Scheduled for completion in September, the 10,800sq.-ft. building will include a workshop with three pits serviced at pit level and two lubrication bays with high-pressure oil feed and a disposal system which burns the waste oil to heat the building.
The new works will service their rapidly expanding fleet of 100 vehicles. Latest additions to the fleet are 24 10-ton Bedford tractive units operating with 40 25-ft. flat semi-trailers and two similarsize box semi-trailers. These are operating under contract to Thorn-A.E.1., providing an express Sunderland-London and south of England service for the television tube manufacturers.
A night trunk service carries up to 750 TV tubes per load on the 265-mile journey between Sunderland and Brimsdown, Middlesex. There the complete load is either taken over by a new driver and taken on to a TV set manufacturer in the south of England, or the trailer is off-loaded on the spot, In the latter case a 20-minute turn-round can be achieved. Empty cartons are carried on the return trip to Sunderland. To handle the southern operations of this contract fleet, valued at more than £100,000, Cawthorn and Sinclair have appointed Mr. T. Baden-Walford southern area manager with an office at Brimsdown.
The Government grant (which is 25 per tent of the total cost of the new building) comes from the Board of Trade under the scheme to aid the north-east region.