Sixties boy:
As previously mentioned the local council gritters are normally driven by road maintenance drivers and managers.Normally they receive “stand by pay” and get paid for all hours worked, as it falls outside drivers hours regulations, they can work 24hrs, which is one of the reasons there’s always a picture of a gritter in a ditch or on it’s side every year.
Also the DOT provided motorway gritters are, or at least were in my time, distributed to the same County Councils and driven by the same road maintenance workers as all the other types.
We had combined highways and motorway depots at Sunbury, Godstone, Weatherhill and our depot at Ewell was the central Transport and Highways depot and we moved them around the different depots as required and brought the DOT ones back in together for return to DOT’s storage facilities in the Spring.
I think in our case Leatherhead Motorway depot has taken over the work of the old long gone Ewell depot and at least Godstone.
While Merrow covered the major trunk routes like A3 which is more or less motorway class anyway and in my time Merrow had the arguably superior 6x6 Maggie Deutz.
As opposed to the DOT 6x4 Foden S85’s which had recently replaced the old Atkinsons but the S85 was a nice wagon to drive.
As a driver based at Ewell I usually only moved all the different types around the County during the day earning a lot less than the road maintenance crews getting night rate overtime and call out premium on top of their road digging wage.