Any old promotor drivers around

Hi Sandway, that certainly looks like Graham to me, I think that I mentioned some time ago on another post that I met him once in the Zagreb Motel but soon after I had posted about it I then remembered that I had also met him on a couple of occasions, one being at The Mocamp.
Before I forget, further to our memories of Radio Tirana “The Voice Of Albania” you might remember that just before the news came on The B.B.C. World Service at 8 p.m. they used to play what I thought at the time was that nursery rhyme “Ride a ■■■■ Horse To Banbury Cross”, It turns out that the piece of music that they used was actually called Lilliburlero and it goes back to the 17th century.

youtube.com/watch?v=ExnZ3Nf_FSw

Now I have not listened to the B.B.C. World Service for many years and I wondered if anybody knows if they still play it.
A few years ago Jazzandy mentioned stopping at The Lemon Trees in Yugoslavia in one of his posts and although it rang a distant bell I couldn’t for the life of me think where it was. I think he said that it was somewhere between Belgrade and Nis going east but the only place that sprang to my mind in that area were The A Frames campsite but that was on the way home. Somebody might remember the place as they had wooden cabins with a big truck parking area at the front along side the main T.I.R. road. It wasn’t one of my favourite overnight stops as there were usually a few Turkish and Bulgarian trucks parked there, along with a few girls knocking on the cab to ask for a cigarette at 1 a.m. in the morning.
I started thinking about which were the most popular watering holes for British drivers transiting Yugo in the 70’s/80’s and the ones that I can remember were Mama’s at Spielfeld on the Austrian side of the border just before the customs. Then there was a restaurant with a large cobbled car park somewhere near Maribor on the left hand side of the road which also had a couple of fuel pumps. Inside the restaurant there was a large tree growing which looked like a very old grape vine and I often wondered if they had built the restaurant around the tree. It was this place that I thought that all the British drivers called The Trees.
The Zagreb Motel and The National Hotel in Belgrade were another two favourites and I wondered if The Lemon Trees which Andy mentioned had been bypassed by a stretch of the Autoput by the start of the 80’s. I can remember that there were three or four sections of Autoput along the T.I.R. route each with it’s own toll booths and I wonder if ever like me, you parked up there for a brew or maybe a bit of a siesta in the middle of a hot summers afternoon.
The restaurant which I mentioned near Maribor always had a bit of a sad memory for me.
On one occasion Alan Morrey who was another Dow driver and myself were on our way home and pulled onto the car park to make some lunch. We had just taken our camping chairs out and were sitting next to the trailer box when two Dutchmen pulled up who were heading east. They parked about fifty yards away from us on our left facing our direction. I can’t remember what make the first truck was, I think that it might have been a Scania 141 but I do remember that the truck that was parked behind was a brand new white D.A.F. pulling a fridge trailer. The two drivers got out and after having a chat walked off towards the restaurant.
After about half an hour Alan and I heard some shouting so we both got up to have a look at what was happening. The guy in the first truck which I think was a Scania had started up his engine and was heading flat out towards us. He then spun it around doing a 360 degree turn and pulled up about six foot in front of the D.A.F. and it was then that we noticed that the cab of the D.A.F. was on fire. The guy with the D.A.F. was frantically winding the legs down on the fridge trailer while the other driver had grabbed a chain out of his trailer box and was trying desperately to put the chain around the D.A.F.s front towing pin. I could see him shielding his face with his left hand so there must have been a lot of heat coming from the cab.
Alan and I ran over to see if there was anything that we could do but we already knew that it was hopeless.
The D.A.F. driver was then trying to pull the pin on the fifth wheel, he was also trying to shield his face so the heat must have been coming out from underneath the cab. He managed to pull the pin but he was unable to climb onto the catwalk to undue the suzies. The other driver had by this time attached the chain onto the front of his bumper and was starting to reverse back but with the brakes still being on in the D.A.F. his wheels just kept spinning on the cobbles.
Alan, the D.A.F. driver and myself all moved out of the way as we could all see the amount of tension that was being put on the chain as the other driver kept creeping forward, then he would put it in reverse and he would reverse back harder each time he did this manoeuvre. I was certain that the chain was going to snap and all of a sudden there was a loud explosion as the camping gas bottle that was in the D.A.F. cab exploded and blew the front windscreen out onto the road.
Up until then the cab had been filled with a mass of thick black smoke but now there were flames as high as the fridge trailer. The other driver kept going backwards and forwards and I thought that he would just carry on until the chain snapped but then something strange happened. All of a sudden there seemed to be a lot of water flowing down underneath the cab on the D.A.F. This we found out later was because the driver had a full 25 litre plastic water container which had now melted and wet the cobbles underneath the D.A.F. The other driver gave it one last hard go in reverse and the D.A.F. came out from underneath the trailer, the airlines stretched out to their full length and then there was a load gush of air as the suzies snapped. The Scania driver managed to drag the flaming D.A.F. cab about thirty feet away from the trailer and then came to a stop while the D.A.F. driver dashed in to unhook the chain from the front of the Scania cab. He then reversed back to where Alan and I were parked.
This had all happened in less than ten minutes and we stood well clear as the flaming diesel flowed along the cobbles and then the tyres started exploding. Somebody must of phoned the fire brigade as a small fire engine arrived about fifteen minutes later and we were all surprised by how quickly they had taken to get there but by now the D.A.F. was down on it’s wheel rims.
I will never forget how those two Dutch lads worked as a team and how they managed to save the fridge trailer that was filled with Belgium chocolate for somewhere in the Middle East.
They told us that it was the D.A.F.s first trip and that they had stopped off in Austria that morning to have a C.B. fitted which they thought had been the probable cause of the fire.
There was nothing that Alan and I could do so we left after about two hours but for about a year after, whenever I parked at that restaurant I could still see the marks where that D.A.F. had burnt out.
Unless you had actually seen a cab fire back then, then you probably would have had no idea just how quickly a lorry fire can get out of control, it certainly surprised me.

Regards Steve.