sandway:
This Leyland unit suddenly appeared one day during the build up to the Baghdad Fair. Not sure what year it was but at a guess 87 or 88. We didn’t ship it in but maybe Davies Turner did.Does anyone know anything about this model?
Just for the record Orient Exhibitions brought out the Leylands at that show which was in 1988, and the 600 group pavilion which involved 23 trailer loads. That Landtrain was stranded at Zackho with paperwork problems three days before the opening so I took off in a taxi with a driver, who I later learned was part of Saddam’s secret police, to head north and sort it out. The moment my driver started shouting at people, customs, police etc., they all quaked in fear and the trailer, one of M&C’s I think, was released immediately. We ran with him all the way down to the fairground and I offloaded it down that rickety steel ramp which I think Promotor used for all the Lansings etc. Leyland signed a contract for 350 municipal trucks for Baghdad during the exhibition. We also had the Tom Collins Jazzband out there playing at the fair and at the British Embassy!
Incidentally all the machine tools on the 600 stand were designed for the production of artillery shells and taken, with many more loads which we shipped over the next months, to a new military factory which was one of the first to be obliterated by the RAF at the the start of the Gulf war.