mushroomman:
bullitt:
Hello again Steve, hope you are well. Its good to see this thread revived again. The missus met up with Stans daughter a few months ago and mentioned this site and also about any photos that they may have of Stanleys travels back in the day. I would say “watch this space” but Im not sure if any thing new will materialise!
Maybe you can answer this question Steve, how far East did Stan go? Did he do Iraq / Jordan / Syria / Saudi etc or was he mainly back and forth to Turkey. The wife cant really remember specifically where he went, just that he was away a lot and for very long periods.
Keep the pics coming, I gotta get myself a pair of those budgie smugglers!!
Cheers mate and all the best, Rick.Rick, can you please check your messages as I have sent you a P.M.
Stan Warmbold.
…with “Corrie” taking a cooling dip!!!
David
They say that every picture tells a story and Jimmy Walker who took this photo told me a few years ago about this one.
Jimmy had just taken his wife Dawn on a trip to Austria and as they pulled into the lanes in Zeebrugge docks Jimmy noticed Stan parked up waiting for the boat. After Jimmy had done his paperwork they walked over to Stan who was having a nap in the sun next to his trailer. Dawn has a great sense of humour so Jimmy said wake him up and ask him for a lift. Dawn had heard a lot about Stan over the years but she had never met him before and Jimmy loved to wind Stan up in a friendly kind of way but he never ever pushed him too far.
Jimmy said that the conversation went something like this.
Dawn: Hello are you going to England. Stan: Yes. Dawn: Can you give me a lift. Stan: No. Dawn: Why not. Stan: Because it’s company policy not to give hitch hikers lifts. Dawn: But you are an owner driver you can change the rules if you want to. (Stan must of been thinking how does she know it’s my own motor). Dawn: Go on give us a lift up to Manchester. (Stan must of been thinking how does she know that I am going up to Manchester). Stan: I can’t give you a lift I am a very happily married man. Dawn: You can drop me off on Briscoe Lane I can get a bus home from there. (Stan must of been thinking how does she know that I live near Briscoe Lane). Dawn: So you can’t give me a lift home then. Stan: No, I am sorry. Dawn: That’s O.K. there is another Dow Freight parked over there I bet that he will give me a lift home. With that Jimmy poked his head around the front of the cab and said have you met my misses Stan. Jimmy said that Stan burst out laughing and said that he thought that he was being set up but Jimmy could tell that Stan was not amused.Stan and Dawn Walker At Zeebrugge.
Steve, the Merc was a left ■■■■■■ and ran on a bit in Derv… I totalled the Merc doh… The Capri had the engine fitted without dad knowing… And I sorted the MOT on the Merc, … Knowing a mate who does repairs and mot’s helps… Also handy in swapping engines
Thank you MUSHROOM MAN like all your posts to the point and help full. yes ALEX was on ACHat the same time. another good experienced man. iwould see the trucks parked around Zeebrugge however back then i did not have time to lounge around like all fridge men had to be elsewhere yesterday.Even on ACH all loads were well planned and all the jobs had been done before so there also no FU—ING about.
It was not untill 1990 that i saw the light,got off fridges, and joined BOWKERS i realised that i had lost out years by not going on to a good permanent dry freight firm and missed out on all the camaraderie that you men had, you cannot buy it…
Hi Paul, I don’t know if your dad ever mentioned to you or your mum this little story but if you get talking to Billy Jones a.k.a. Billy Scouse or Graham Walker on Friday then they might remember it.
Your dad, Ken Singleton a.k.a. Singo and Frankie Andrews a.k.a. Frankie Scouse were heading for the West German/ Austrian border at Sharding one Saturday evening about six o’clock on a winters night. This was about 1978/79 and at the time you couldn’t drive lorries in Austria after 3 p.m. on a Saturday until 10 p.m. on the Sunday night but Singo knew of a place in the village just before the border where they could get a beer and something to eat so they decided to follow him.
They parked up in what looked like a country lane and they all climbed into Singo’s cab to have a pot of tea. Frankie Scouse said we can’t park here, do you realise that there is a graveyard right next to us. Singo said it’s alright he had parked there before and the neighbours never bothered him, besides it was only a short walk to the pub that he knew. Frank said that he thought that they should park somewhere else as the place was giving him a creepy feeling besides there was nowhere for them to have a wash. Singo said we can have a cab wash and Frank said but I haven’t got much water left. Singo told him that there was a tap in the corner of the graveyard where they could have a wash and fill up their water containers. Frank said why don’t we see if we can find somewhere better to park, we could even go up to the border and park on the bridge. Corrie said there is nothing at the border you know that, what’s wrong with you Frankie are you scared of ghosts or something. Err no, said Frankie not really but you have got to admit that is does look spooky out there with those little candles flickering away in those jars on some of the graves. After they finished their brew Singo said I am going for a wash get your washing gear Frank and bring you water container are you coming Corrie. Ken said no I shall stay in my cab and boil a pan of hot water, give us a call when you get changed and you are ready to go out. Singo and Frankie walked through the graveyard with their torches over to where the tap was. Singo told me that he could tell that Frankie was scared as he kept looking over his shoulder every couple of seconds. Just as they were about to finish having a wash they heard a noise which sounded like OOOOOH, Frank whispered did you hear that, what was it, as he grabbed Singo’s arm. It’s probably just an owl said Singo, but then they heard it again only this time it sounded a lot closer. OOOOOOOOH they heard it again and shone their torches down the path where they had just come from towards the lorries. A figure came running towards them shouting OOOOOOOOOOH, OOOOOOOOOH and Frankie ran off into the darkness but when he heard Corrigan and Singo laughing he turned round and came back. I knew it was you Corrigan, Frank said, only you would do something childish like putting a bed sheet over your head and try to scare people. When Singo told me this story he said that what made him laugh so much was that he had never seen a ghost before under a Candy Stripped bed sheet. 
R.I.P. Corrie.
Fantastic story, love it… I never knew my dad was such a prankster…
Thank you for all attending to celebrate my Dad’s life, my family and I was overwhelmed with so many drivers that attended to pay their respects. You all had such kind words and great memories to share.
Kind regards Paul
paulfmjc:
Thank you for all attending to celebrate my Dad’s life, my family and I was overwhelmed with so many drivers that attended to pay their respects. You all had such kind words and great memories to share.
Kind regards Paul
I was there in spirit Paul,however couldn’t make as I had prior commitment in Portugal where I have retired to,I hope the send off went well and wish both you and your family well in moving forward.
David
Hi Paul, I didn’t finish work until midnight on Friday but I was aware that it was 3 p.m. on Friday afternoon where you and your dads mates were. I still had a beer before I went to bed and thought of some of the very happy times that I shared with your dad Ken. I never heard anybody say a bad word about your dad and just like all his mates I am proud to say that I worked with him. Ken will never be far away, he will always be in peoples thoughts wherever they are.
I wish you Paul, your mum Sheila, Vanessa and Julie all the best for the future.
Best regards Steve.
I appreciate your kind thoughts, and words.
Paul
Going back over a few old threads, this one is well worth a look at over the weekend. some great pictures and tales from back in the day! 
Hi Bullitt, we mentioned a couple of weeks ago on the Promotors thread about the Port of Split in Yugoslavia and I said that it had just reminded me of a story back in 1980 when I had to deliver a couple of tractors down there.
I did say that if I got the time then I would try and write it down and as it was also the last trip of the year it was also one of those ‘will he or won’t he make it home for Christmas’ anecdotes.
So after writing it all out I decided to put it on here on Christmas Day and as you know, the Trucknet site went down for most of the day. After several hours I gave up and thought that I might save it until next year but as I came across an old photo of your Uncle Stan that I am not sure if you have seen before I thought that I would give it another shot before it goes into the recycle bin.
So to save time in reading all the way through it then just look at the last four lines to find out if I got home in time for Christmas 1980.
I hope that you and all the Trucknet members have a fantastic and prosperous 2017.
Best regards Steve.
Stan Warmbold.
Yugoslavian Christmas 1980.
It must have been on the Thursday the 11th of December 1980 when I was told that I had to load two Massey Fergusson front end loaders and take them to the Port of Split in Yugoslavia.
I had already had two days off and was hoping that I would be given a quick trip to West Germany or to Austria so that I could be home for at least three or fours days before the Christmas holiday. It was fairly obvious that I was going to be week ended somewhere along the way and that I would lose at least a day doing customs formalities. I had been told to collect my paperwork from Dow Freights yard in Stockport along with all the necessary paperwork and my £400 running money. I drove my car in to the yard, parked next to my tractor unit and after getting my truck keys from the office I transferred all my clean bedding, clean clothes and all the food that I had bought for the trip into my truck. I parked my car and locked it up in front of the offices and went inside to get a briefing about the trip.
The time was about 9 a.m. and after being told that I was loading at Massey Fergusson’s factory in Trafford Park and which trailer I was taking, I double checked all my paperwork and my Carnet T.I.R. to make sure that it was all correct and that I had the relevant permits for each country that needed them. I had also been told that four of us would be loading in Massey’s that morning and that two of the other drivers were already there.
I went back into the yard and checked the oil and water on my truck and made sure that my fuel tank was still full. I could see the trailer that I was taking parked up in the corner of the yard and after coupling it up and checking it for any damage I kicked all the tyres, put in a new tachograph and set off for the half an hour journey to Trafford Park.
When I arrived at Massey Fergusson’s I was pleased to see that the other two of our drivers Frank Andrews and Lee Marland were just about to start loading. Because of the vertical exhaust pipe on the front end loaders the overall height was higher than the side of the tilt trailers that we were using. They only stuck up about six inches above the frame of the trailer but this caused a slight problem because then the trailer could not be sealed as to conform to T.I.R. regulations. So we then had to do what we called a strip out, this involved pulling the sheet or the tilt cover forward up to the first bay of the trailer. The tilt trailers had four bays each with a door on each side which was also called a sideboard. A plastic cord with a wire inside it went along the front and both sides and could be joined together at the back with a customs seal. The cord had to go through dozens of steel eyelets which were fixed to all the sideboards, the front and the tail board at the back of the trailer.
This cord was taken out on each side as far as the first bay at the front. The sheet was then rolled up or pushed forward towards the front of the trailer and the wooden roof boards and the metal roof cross members were then removed. A rope was then secured underneath the front side board of the trailer and thrown over the top of the sheet or the section of the rolled up tilt cover. The rope was then pulled tight by using a double dolly knot and secured underneath the opposite side board.
Although it was a one man job to do a strip out Frank and Lee gave me a hand as it was a lot quicker when two or three people did it and we always helped each other. We had to back onto a ramp to load the tractors and Masseys workers would then drive the tractors onto the back of our trailers after confirming that the correct tractors corresponded with our collection documents.
Frank loaded first and I helped him put the steel cross members back into the roof while Lee backed on to the ramp. The front end loaders or as we just called them tractors, had been loaded with the front bucket turned upside down against the headboard of the trailer resting on the floor. There was also a back hoe which had been turned sideways and placed on the floor. Next to the large back wheels there were also two stabilizing legs which had also been lowered. As an extra security measure Frank used two chains and strainers on each tractor which he attached to the tractor. Then, after removing the second and the back side doors of the trailer he secured the chains to the trailer. The two side boards and most of the wooden roof boards were then placed at the front of the trailer or underneath the tractor in the first bay.
As Frank and Lee had not yet been to the yard to fuel up and to collect their running money and permits we arranged that they wouldn’t wait for me to be loaded. I told them that I would be stopping at The Hollies on the A5 near Cannock for a forty five minute break and then I would stop at Toddington Services on the M1 for a fifteen minute break. After that I would be driving straight to Dover via The North Circular Road, Holloway Road, through The Blackwall Tunnel then onto the South Circular and onto the A2.
Not long after they had left another of our drivers called John Caine appeared in his Ford Transcontinental and it was good to learn that John was also loading for the same place as me in Yugoslavia. I helped him strip down his tilt and after I was loaded he helped me to chain up and to sort out the trailer. As he had already been to our yard he had collected his documents, I helped him to secure his load and we set off to The Hollies together. We had been there for about ten minutes before Lee and Frank turned up and after having lunch we all set off in a convoy to Dover.
It was probably between six and seven o’clock when we reached Dover Eastern Docks and after booking in at the Townsend Thorenson office we were told that we would be able to board the 20.00 hours passenger ferry to Zeebrugge. We all parked in the customs sealing bay and walked up the stairs to get our T.I.R. Carnets started. As we would be travelling what was called ‘Open T.I.R.’ because the trailer could not be fully sealed, the Customs Officer climbed onto the trailer and put a lead customs seal on the cab door handle on both of the tractors.
By 8 p.m. we were loaded on board the ship and made our way up to the drivers restaurant. At the Townsend Thorenson office along with our boarding cards we had been issued with three little yellow tickets. One was for a £1.00 discount off a meal, another one was for a small complementary bottle of wine (white or red) and the other one you had to present to the Purser who would allocate you a drivers cabin.
As we all had our money in £’s Stirling we had to change a certain amount into Austrian Schillings and West German Marks or Deutsch Marks, at the time we worked it out to be roughly four marks to the pound.
After we had changed our money we went down below to find our cabin which was quite basic compared to the passengers cabins on the upper decks. The drivers cabins were four man rooms with two pairs of bunk beds and a couple of chairs. The toilets, showers and wash hand basins were further along the corridor. Lee and Frank quickly grabbed the bottom bunks and being the youngest I didn’t mind climbing on to one of the top ones. As John was the last in the room he had no option except to put his washing gear on the spare top bunk and then we all decided to go for an evening meal.
The drivers restaurant on the passenger ships had seating for about twenty drivers. It was a limited menu and we had to handover our small yellow ticket to get a £1.00 discount. As we were having dinner we discussed what our plan of attack would be for this trip. Normally we would just do a trip and play it as we went along as all the best planned trips very often changed without a minutes notice.
But this trip was different, we all knew that whatever happened we just had to be back at one of The Channel Ports or Rotterdam before midday on the 24th of December as this would be the last sailing back to the U.K. before Christmas. If you missed that last boat then you would have to wait until 27th of December before you could catch another one, which is exactly what happened to one of our drivers called Ken Singleton the year before.
Ken wasn’t the only one who had missed the last boat to get home for Christmas and he probably would not of been the last British driver to spend Christmas on the continent. There was a rumour going around one year of a driver missing the last boat by half an hour who had to wait in Zeebrugge with his load of Christmas trees from Bulgaria for three days.
Normally we would have had enough time to do the trip in twelve days if you could back load straight away or if you could reload on your way home but sometimes you might have to travel to a different country miles away to pick up an ’urgent’ load. We all hoped that our import manager Graham Walker would pull out all the stops to get us an ‘easy’ reload, he usually did. To make sure that we were back to the port in time we decided that we would have to do some double shifts, this involved having the minimum eight hours rest before starting another nine hour shift.
If I remember correctly (but I am not absolutely sure) The European Union at the time allowed you to drive up to 56 hours a week which were usually 6 x nine hour days but on two occasions you could drive for ten hours and you had to have a minimum eight hours sleep period in between shifts.
Once you left the E.U. and entered The Communist Block these driving rules did not apply as their vehicles were not fitted with tacho graphs and the local police had no idea of how they worked. As a rule of thumb it made sense to stick to the law in the West but in the Commie Bloke you could run however you liked. So we all decided that when we left the boat we would park up for the night, put a new tacho card in and have eight hours sleep and do a ten hour shift the following day.
After our meal we bought our duty frees which included a bottle of whiskey for about £2.50 and 200 cigarettes for £2.50 I didn’t smoke but Dow allowed you £5 each trip to use as a ‘Baksheesh’. This was like a gratuity to anybody who helped you along the way if ever you had a problem and it was surprising how often a simply thing like twenty cigarettes or a bottle of whisky could turn a ’big problem’ into a ’no problem’.
Now I never smoked but things like cigarettes, Whiskey, Vodka, Nescafe Coffee and blue Denim jeans in The Eastern Block countries and places like Turkey were better than the local currency.
Because we did a lot of work for Rothmans in Spennymore near Durham, I always bought Rothmans cigarettes on the boat. There were Duty Free Shops in the Communist Countries and the prices were even cheaper than on the boat but you had to pay in hard foreign currency and you had to show your passport. If you were buying in their, what they called ‘Dollar Shops’ because they preferred American Dollars then buying American cigarettes like Marlboro or Kent is what the locals really liked. In the ’Dollar Shops’ you could buy almost anything from French car tyres, to Italian washing machines so long as you had the hard currency.
We also bought a carton of Heineken beer each as some of the countries that we visited the beer was just about passable. Anyway, 24 cans for £4 was a bargain and sometimes it was nice to have a night cap parked up in a lay-by in the middle of nowhere even if the beer was a bit warm.
We then went down to our cabins to get three hours sleep as it was a four and a half crossing to Zeebrugge and we had already been at sea for an hour and a half. As we all had a couple of pints of beer with our meal then it didn’t take long before we were all asleep.
About half an hour before we docked the steward opened the cabin door and said “it’s time to get up lads and here’s a cup of tea for ya”. This didn’t always happen as it depended which steward was working at the time but whenever we did get a cup of tea all our drivers would give the steward ten pence each. I am sure that he didn’t pay for the tea himself and it was just a token of our appreciation but he was always seemed grateful. We all knew through experience that if we got a move on then we had just enough time to get dressed, go to the loo, have a quick wash, brush our teeth and make our way down to the trucks with our duty frees before the crews called out “Harbour Stations”.
This was the signal to say that we were about to enter the harbour and in about ten minutes we would be docking.
We walked down the steps to where all the cars and trucks were parked. I can’t remember exactly how many passengers there were on the ferry that night but I seem to think that there weren’t that many trucks. The deck workers went around taking off all the chains that secured all the vehicles. Once the ferry was in the harbour the bow of the ship used to open up and several huge fans were started to remove all the fumes from the vehicles exhaust pipes. The fans made a terrific noise and if one of the trucks in front of you had lost it’s air pressure then you had no option but to wait in what appeared to be a cloud of fog. Meanwhile the driver would be revving his engine like mad until the air was built up so that the brakes on his vehicle were released before he could set off.
All the trucks followed each other one at a time as they drove off the ramp, onto the dock and past the line of trucks that were waiting to board. We drove across the car park and stopped at the customs shed just before the exit of the docks.
The customs shed was not much bigger than a large garden shed. Two customs men were in there, one man stamped all the drivers paperwork and the other man just didn’t look interested. As is was about 1.30 in the morning he probably just wanted to get back to sleep. Exiting the Port of Zeebrugge must have been one of the fastest customs post on the planet. From getting out of your cab to getting back in it usually took about four minutes if nobody was in front of you. I was never asked to have an inspection of the trailer or for them to have a look in my cab.
We had all arranged to park up on the sea wall and then to have an eight hour break. Just outside the port there was a small roundabout and if you went all the way around it then you had the port on your right and the seawall on your left. When you drove to the end of this cobbled road which was about 500 metres long, remembering the continental drivers number one rule which was, drive on the right, you came to a cul de sac where you could comfortably spin your vehicle round and head back the other way. Just before you got back to the small roundabout we would park up there on the right.
The footpath here was about twelve feet wide and was about five feet above the road. On one side of the cobbled path there was a five foot wall and on the other side of this wall there was about a forty foot drop with the sea and the beach on the other side.
There were a few advantages for parking here overnight, one of them being that it was very quiet apart from if the tide was coming in when you could hear the sea, sometimes quite loudly. With the road being a lot lower than the top of the sea wall it stopped the cab from rocking about in the wind.
Another one was that drivers who had travelled from the North of England, Scotland or South Wales had already done a good days travelling to get to Dover so they were overdue at least an eight hours rest by the time that they had got off the boat.
From where we parked anybody who was entering or leaving the port could see you parked up and if it was somebody from our company or a friend of yours they would often come across and say hello or even tell you who they had seen in front of you.
By the time that I had taken a ten hour brake at least two more boats could of docked and if I was travelling down towards the Middle East I would sometimes open my curtains and find one of our trucks or one of Dayson’s, Whittles, Falcongate’s or Hick’s etc parked up behind me. You always knew that they would be going in the same direction so we would often end up running together for at least the next few days. There were a couple of occasions when the Dockers or the Seamen in Dover or Zeebrugge went on strike and as the lanes in the dock car park filled up then they would start parking lorries along the sea wall.
I think that also at the time a U.K. night out was about £12 and a continental night out was about £20 so it made financial sense to try and get across to Zeebrugge.
As it was now two o’clock in the morning due to the one hour time difference we all parked up along the seawall, we all put in a new blank tacho, pulled the curtains closed and went to bed.
Coming off the ferry at night.
One of the Scanias.
YUGO CHRISTMAS 2.
The next morning at 9.30 a.m. Lee was banging on the door telling us that it was nearly time to make a start. As Lee’s M.A.N. 16.280 was only six months old it had been fitted with a night heater so Lee had got up first and put the kettle on. I got dressed and walked along to Lee’s truck with my cup. Frank was already sat in Lee’s cab and moved over to let me in. Frank said that he wanted to call into the Fina filling station at the end of the town as he had some Belgium Francs left from his last trip and thought that he would buy himself a toasted sandwich. Lee said that we might as well all call in there to have a wash and some breakfast. I agreed and so the first big hit of our trip was going to be a distance of two kilometres. John banged on the side of the cab and Lee sat on his bunk so that John could sit in the drivers seat. We looked out at the weather, it was grey and overcast and we all wondered how long it was going to be before we would hit the really bad weather.
We probably stopped for about half an hour at the Fina garage which also had a little shop inside selling truck accessories such as air horns, truckers jackets, truck fridges and fans which were items that were a lot cheaper than the ones that were available over in the U.K. at the time. There was a small café inside the garage and if you fuelled up there then they would always give the driver a free coffee. They did a really good breakfast of ham and eggs which was served with a little basket of very fresh Belgium bread and a cup of Dutch coffee. As soon as you had finished your coffee the waitress would come round and give you a top up if you wanted one with out paying anything extra. It was always a favourite place for stopping on the way home and buying a couple of cartons of cheap Primus Belgium beer and they would accept British currency.
We left Zeebrugge after having a hot wash and a good breakfast which was always a great start to any day on the road. Not long after passing Brugge we picked up the motorway and headed toward Brussels on what was then the E 5. You could join the E5 at the start in Ostend and follow this road all the way through to Istanbul but it wasn’t motorway all the way. As we were going to travel through Hungary we would be turning off the E5 near Nuremberg in West Germany where we hoped to reach that night.
The motorways in Belgium were very good but I seem to remember a section around Brussels that hadn’t been joined up back then and so we had to travel along a main road for about twenty kilometres. I remember that this was somewhere near the Atomium because as I looked over to my right I could see the very distinctive Atomium building that was built for the 1958 Brussels World Fair.
There were two borders that we used to exit and enter Belgium and there wasn’t that much difference in the distance. The Belgium/ West German border at Aachen Sud or South was the most popular but in my opinion it often took a bit longer to clear customs. The biggest advantage was that there was a good Les Routiers truck stop there which was called The Wally Stop, although if I was passing on a Tuesday or a Wednesday night then I would often call in as this was when the meal of the day was Mussels and Chips. I used to love their fresh mussels which were always served in a stainless steel bucket, that gives you an idea of how big the portions were.
The other border was called Aachen Nord or North and this was the customs post for West Germany and Holland.
The trucks would pull off the Belgium motorway and run into a large lay-by where there was a small glass hut on the left. Inside there used to be a Dutch customs man and as you slowed down as you approached the hut he would always wave you on. In over seven years of going this way I can only remember getting stopped once. You then pulled out back onto the motorway and you were now in Holland for the next ten kilometres or so until you came to the Dutch/ West German border post.
It usually took between twenty minutes and an hour to do both the Dutch and the West German customs unless the B.A.G. was there. The B.A.G. was what we all called The Bundes Autobahn Gestapo or the state motorway police. They were like the U.K.’s Ministry Of Transport inspectors but looked scarier with the long black leather coats that they wore along with the slashed peak on some of their hats which was enough for lot’s of U.K. drivers to confess that they were running on red diesel or they had driven over their hours.
The first service area on the autobahn I think was called Frechen and we decided to pull on there and make a bit of lunch. We were able to park the four trucks in a line next to each other. John climbed into my cab and as Lee had parked next to me Frank got in Lee’s cab. With the window down we were able to speak to each other from cab to cab. Normally in the summer we would of sat around somebody’s trailer box but in December it was much warmer to cook in the cab and pass cups, pans and other things across to each other.
It was probably about 3 p.m. by the time that we had left there and headed for Cologne where we crossed the river Rhine. We passed The Combivehiker over on our right and I looked down to see if I could see any other British companies trucks waiting to board that nights train.
The Combivehiker was a piggy back train that carried international trucks across West Germany from Cologne to Munich. It was based in the Cologne railway goods yard and I think that it may of gone as far as Ljubljana in Yugoslavia and I did hear that there was a train to Ludwigshafen at one time. The idea was to try and keep some of the heavy goods vehicles off the West German roads and if you couldn’t get a West German transit permit from the International Road Permits Office in Newcastle then you had to use the train to get across West Germany.
I don’t know how much you had to pay for the train, I am not sure as I never had to use it but I believe that when you did then you would be issued with a permit to drive across West Germany on your next trip.
The traffic on Friday afternoons on the Autobahns was always heavy and it seemed a long slow journey in the rain as we headed towards Weiskirchen Services which was just past Frankfurt Airport. This was a normal days drive for us as it was a fair days work from Zeebrugge to Frankfurt back then. If we were really making good time then we would push on to Wurtsburg Services or later on when it was built The Lomo truck stop or Gieselwind which was about another hour I.I.R.C.
If you had to stop for the night Wieskirchen was fine because it had a restaurant, toilets, showers and plenty of parking. Another attraction was that it had a beer machine and for one Deutsch Mark, which was about twenty five pence you could get a cold 500ml bottle of really good beer.
There used to be an oldish women who worked in the restaurant called Karen or Janet who was originally from Liverpool. Karen or was it Janet would often come over and talk to the British drivers and she would remember most of their names. If she saw you sat on your own she would come over and say things like so and so from Laser’s was in earlier or what’s his name from Brit European was in last night. Her German was very good as she had lived over there for many years. She was married to an ex British soldier who had got demobbed and worked driving for the American military. I remember her telling us that they had built their own house not far from Weiskirchen services and I think that she enjoyed speaking English to all the drivers as she always made us feel welcome.
We must have had another forty five minute break there as we really did want to crack on and get down near Nuremberg. I can’t remember exactly where we stopped that night but we weren’t far off. Frank pulled into a large lay-by around 8 p.m. and said let’s call it a day and we all agreed that for driving in Germany on a Friday afternoon / evening we hadn’t done too bad.
The West German lay-bys or Rest Areas were always very clean and tidy. You would often see the autobahn cleaning teams in their bright orange overalls emptying the waste bins and steam cleaning the parking areas. Most of them were Turks or Guest Arbiters which were Guest Workers and looking back now they wouldn’t of looked out of place in Guantanamo Bay.
In the winter if there had been a snow storm overnight, then the West German Police would go around banging on the doors of the sleeping drivers to see if they were O.K. if they couldn’t hear the sound of a night heater ticking over.
As soon as we stopped we all put in a new tacho card and put the Tacho in bed mode, this allowed us to start at 4 a.m. the next morning. From where we were we had to get across the rest of West Germany and Austria before 3 p.m. on the Saturday afternoon as that’s when the week end driving ban started in Austria.
We had been told to go through Hungary because of our company permit allocation. The International Road Transport Office in Newcastle issued permits for all the countries which we travelled or transited through. Each company was issued with so many permits a year and there always seemed to be not enough permits to go around. As we were sometimes short of permits at the end of the year they sometimes had to contract owner drivers who had their own permits to do some of the journeys.
For example, I.I.R.C. Yugoslavia, which was a major transit route would issue permits from January 1st to December 31st . As these permits were very popular the office in Newcastle would often run out of them by November and so British drivers on their way to Turkey and the Middle East would have to divert through Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.
Some countries would do two allocations a year from January 1st to June 30th and July 1st to December 31st.
Our Hungarian permits expired on December 31st and if they were not stamped and returned to Newcastle then that might affect our Hungarian permit allocation for the next year. Usually if we did a trip and managed not to have a permit stamped then we would collect an extra £5 when we did our expenses as it was ‘possible’ that that permit could be used again. As far as I knew international road haulage in my opinion was not on a level playing field.
I don’t know how true it was and somebody might of heard this before but apparently if you were a foreign vehicle delivering into the U.K. you didn’t need a permit.
Now the story goes that in the late seventies and I must use the word allegedly, what the Bulgarian State Transport Company which I think was called So Mat or something similar did, was to send a truck up to Belgium with half a load for the U.K. When the driver had tipped the load in Belgium he would then meet up and share the load with several other Bulgarian drivers who would then travel over to the U.K. and each truck would deliver their couple of boxes. Then they would load for the Middle East from a freight forwarder and get paid in Pounds Stirling. This hard currency would not only pay the fare of the ferry but for any of the Communist countries back then hard currency was a great asset to their economy. I wonder if anybody else had ever heard of that story all those years ago.
When driving on the continent you always had to think about where and when you were going to fill up with diesel as this could play an important part in how much profit the trip could make. There was a huge difference in fuel prices in different countries and so it always made sense to fuel up wherever you could buy the cheaper fuel.
Going into West Germany where the fuel was expensive you were only allowed 200 litres of diesel unless you had what they called a Tankshein. If you had more than 200 litres then you had to pay the extra German fuel tax on every litre which would make your cheaper fuel become more expensive. When you were leaving West Germany and you had more than 200 litres, say you had 300 litres, then you would declare your 300 litres by filling in a Tankshein which had your registration number on it. The German customs would sometimes check how much fuel you were actually carrying and would stamp your Tankshein as you were about to leave the country.
When you returned on your next journey and you were using the same vehicle then you had to show the German customs your Tankshein and you were allowed to take in 300 litres without paying the extra German Fuel Tax.
The fuel prices on the Autobahn Service areas was always a lot dearer than the fuel sold at some of the Hypermarkets and so we would often pull off the Autobahn to fuel up. Between Cologne and Frankfurt there was along steep hill that we called The Catsback which had cameras above a gantry across the autobahn. For about six kilometres trucks were not allowed to over take while going down this hill, it was very well signposted and the Politzi used to wait in the Agip fuel station at the top of the next hill when you past the turn off for Limburg.
Just after this if you took the next slip road there was a Hypermarket that sold cheap fuel and we had all called in there to fill up our tanks and as it was nearly Christmas they gave us all a free 1981 calendar.
The next morning at 4 a.m. I got up and gave everybody a call, Lee put the kettle on and after a cup of tea and some biscuits while we sat in Lee’s nice warm cab we set off into the cold dark morning.
Lee led the way, the reason for this was because his new truck had been fitted with an air deflector on the cab roof. Frank’s Scania, John’s Ford Transcontinental and my old column gear change M.A.N. all had luminous head boards displaying the companies name which made it easier to see if we were all running together. That was one of the things that I really liked about those luminous headboards because they never had them in the Communist Block and you could always tell if a Brit, a Dutchman or a Dane was coming the other way.
It was always reassuring to know that if you were travelling at night then you could tell just how far your mate was behind you.
We turned off the Munich autobahn and headed towards Regensburg before making our way towards the West German/Austrian border post at Sharding. This border post was on the River Danube and as it was around 7 a.m. on the Saturday morning when we arrived there the border post at the bridge was empty.
It was always a good idea to take out your Tachograph card and put it out of sight in your document folder that you always carried with you into the customs post. Sometimes, the German police at the border (like they did that morning) would ask to see your Tacho card which meant that you had to walk all the way back to your cab if you didn’t have it. The Policeman must of noticed that we all had over eight hours sleep and that we had not been speeding, he gave them back to us and said “Alless Gut”. It only took about forty minutes to do both the West German and the Austrian sides and so we carried on through the town and past the castle as we climbed away from the river valley just as the snow started to fall.
We stopped at the first big lay-by that we came to, Lee put the kettle on and I volunteered to open my packet of prepacked bacon. Frank buttered the bread and we all sat there having a belated, well earned Saturday morning breakfast. John was press ganged into doing the washing up.
Eventually we picked up the Saltzburg/Vienna autobahn near Wells and headed for a small town called Saint Valentine where there was a hotel that had a large car park with a separate dining room for truck drivers and by now the snow had turned to sleet.
The Saint Valentine Hotel was right next to the motorway slip road, in fact you could see whose trucks were parked there even before you got to the autobahn exit. As it was almost mid day we decided to go into the drivers restaurant to have a hot wash, some lunch and book a forty five minute break.
The hotel really valued the Truck drivers as their customers, in fact to me it was one of the best truck stops in Europe and we had nothing like it in the U.K. at the time. There was a very big parking area at the front of the hotel just for trucks and a separate dining area with wash hand basins and a shower. The shower you had to pay for by obtaining a special token that you put into a coin box which gave you about fifteen minutes of hot water.
During the week you would find drivers from all over the continent parking up there for the night. They were mainly Dutch, Belgium and West German but you could often see the trucks parked there from the U.K. Companies like Lloyds of Ludlow, Berrisfords, Thompson-Jewitt, A1 Transport, Hercocks, Cadwallender and Moorlock’s who were all regulars.
Saint Valentine Hotel, Austria. Easter 1980.
Saint Valentine Hotel, Austria. 2014.
It was less than a two hours drive from Vienna and was a handy place if you were week ending but it could prove to be very expensive after a couple of meals and quite a few draught beers.
I remember on my first trip for Dow Freight that I spent most of my first Easter there along with another four of the Dow drivers.
I had read that the Mauthausen Concentration Camp was only six kilometres away and promised myself that one day I would either walk or get a taxi to the place just to have a look around but of course I never did.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauthause … ation_camp
To me, one of the best bits of road to drive along in Europe in the eighties was the road from Salzburg to Vienna on a nice summers day. The scenery was fantastic with lots of wonderful views of lakes, Alpine meadows, amazing looking Tyrolean type chalets, old working farms and what looked like a couple of Byzantine churches with their onion shaped domes.
Two years ago we went on a coach trip around Europe and part of the tour was a night out in Munich and then the following day we went to spend the weekend in Vienna. It was part of the trip that I was really looking forward to but I can only tell you how sad and disappointed I was.
Most of the journey was like driving in a tunnel as there were miles those anti pollution screens or noise reducing barriers. These were about twelve feet high and even in a coach I had trouble to see over them. The rest of the passengers must of thought that I was mad every time I said excitedly to my wife “just around this next corner there is lovely old church next to a lake” only to find that the next four miles or so had those noise pollution screens. If there were no screens about then you just couldn’t miss seeing a bloody wind farm, there were hundreds of them about, all over Europe.
They say that the past is a foreign country that you can never revisit. Well anybody who visited Europe in the 60’s/70’s/ 80’s and 90’s probably saw it at it’s best.
It was about 12.30 p.m. and after finishing our plate of Bratwurst sausage and Sauerkraut Frank said “we had better get going“. I knew that we shouldn’t of had that small draught beer with our meal as Lee and John said “let’s cancel and forget about Christmas” but in the end we decided to push on.
We arrived at Klingenbach which was the last Austrian town just before the border at about 2.45p.m. just 15 minutes before the Austrian week end ban came into force. If we hadn’t done the long shifts that we had then we would of had to park up somewhere until 10 p.m. on the Sunday night when the ban had finished.
A thing that has always stuck out in my mind was that somewhere along the road between Vienna and the border there was a huge refugee camp that we used to pass. It’s only now with the help of Google that you can find out about these things some thirty six years later.
We did our Austrian customs and drove about a kilometre towards the Hungarian border. As we approached it I felt the same feeling as I always did whenever I looked up at the watch towers and saw the miles of high barbed wire fences and the armed border guards with their A.K. 47’s and their Alsatian dogs. It was strange but for some reason I always felt that I had butterflies in my stomach whenever I was about to go behind The Iron Curtain.
My first truck at Dow BFE155s taken in the summer in a West German lay-by.
YUGO CHRISTMAS 3.
To be fair, I always thought that Hungary was one of the best places in the Commie Block that we visited. There was only one short section of motorway just before Budapest, in fact I think that it was only two lanes so it was more like a spruced up duel carriageway. Most of the other roads were in a fairly good condition as they were nearly all bitumen and in the countryside you could put your foot down and make good progress because quite a lot of Hungary was quite flat. There were still a lot of roads that were still cobbled, especially in the old towns and the cities which could be very dangerous when they were covered in snow and ice.
Whenever you crossed from The West into The East it was like going back 30 years into the 1950’s. Horses and carts were very popular especially in the remote country areas. I remember the first time that I went to Poland in the winter, as I approached a large town I could smell something that I hadn’t smelt since I was a kid but not having smelt it for over twenty years it came back to me instantly, it was Smog. Nearly all the factories and the power stations were still powered by coal as there appeared to be no such thing as The Clean Air Act in the Commie Block.
Each communist country was different and you would sometimes hear tales about the secret police or how bent the police were. For the first couple of trips that I did I often felt different levels of uneasiness whenever I travelled through the communist countries. From the East German Police who you would sometimes see stood behind a tree looking along the autobahn with a pair of binoculars to the Rumanian Militia who could be sat in a hut at the entrance to some of the towns.
On one occasion I was flying along towards a little Rumanian town where they had a police watch tower on the right hand side. I could see the policeman looking towards me when he suddenly leapt towards the ladder, slid down it and almost jumped straight in front of me waving his arms about. I slammed my brakes on and as I looked in my mirror he had disappeared in a cloud of dust. I wasn’t sure if I had hit him but I knew that I must be in a lot of trouble due to the speed that I was doing. I stopped the truck and out of the swirling dust walked this shabby looking cop who asked me for a cigarette. I gave him one and he said “tank you” he just turned around and walked back to his police post.
On another occasion, another Dow driver and myself were loading wine in a small town in Bulgaria when an oldish fellow who was fairly well dressed came along with a chair and sat about twenty metres away watching us. After about half an hour we asked the interpreter as to what his job was and she said casually “oh he is just the party member who is watching what people are doing”.
I think that I only ever got stopped by the Hungarian police once on the only stretch of motorway that they had at the time between Tatabanya and Budapest. Two policemen in a marked car were stood by the side of the road and flagged me down as I approached. The older cop asked for my Tacho and appeared to be showing the younger cop how they worked. He then gave it back to me and said “Drive Gut”.
The shops in Hungary were much better stocked than most of the other Commie countries and you didn’t see as many queue’s outside the grocers or the butchers.
It was a shame really because when you were a foreign driver in places like the Commie Block or Turkey you would often come into contact with people like the police or the customs men who weren’t always straight. The police in some countries would stop you and fine you just to supplement their wages. Most customs men when doing a cabin control would always ask you for a cigarette or a cassette or anything else that they might take a shining to.
When you actually got to meet the local people or the workers where you were delivering to or collecting from the greater majority were very friendly and inquisitive. On a few occasions over the years people invited back to their homes to show their hospitality and on many occasions people would come up to me to practice their English.
At the Sopron border there was barrier across the road next to a set of traffic lights. The barrier was painted with red, white and green stripes, the colours of the Hungarian flag. When the barrier went up and the red light changed to green you drove forward towards a sentry box where two soldiers opened a large gate. The sentry box was also painted with red, green and white stripes and the soldiers with their A.K. 47 assault rifles would wave you forward towards a building on the right next to a weighbridge. All the trucks had to go over the weighbridge which was operated by Hungariocamion who were the state owned company responsible for transport.
Hungariocamion were probably one of the biggest if not the biggest transport company in the world. Most foreign drivers had a lot of respect for the Hungariocamion drivers and their operation. It was rumoured that all their drivers had to be qualified vehicle fitters before they were allowed to drive into the West.
The thing that annoyed a lot of us British driver at the time was that when you went onto the weighbridge you had to hand them your C.M.R. This document contained not only the weight of all the goods that you carried but also the names of the customer, where it was loaded, the value of the load and the place where it was to be delivered. All these details were entered into a book that they had and there would have been no reason why somebody from the Hungarian Embassy in London could of gone round to any of our customers and offered them a lower rate for transporting their goods. I am sure that they would of welcomed the hard currency.
I think that most, if not all the Hungarian border posts had a weighbridge and they would often charge you a small fortune if you were overweight on any of your axles.
If your weight was O.K. then you drove forward and parked underneath a canopy to where another soldier and a customs man would be standing.
The soldier would have a little wooden box attached to a leather strap around his neck. He would ask for your passport and check it to see if you had an Hungarian visa. He would then put your passport into his little wooden box and move on to the next vehicle.
The customs man who wore a different uniform with the word Vam or Vama would say “Cabin Control” and climb into you cab. I can never remember the Hungarian officials asking for anything like cassettes or cigarettes as was normal at most of the other Communist border posts. They would often look under your sleeping bag and rummage through you food box but they would very rarely ask for anything. They would ask how much foreign currency you had and would sometimes flick through your books or shake them to make sure that there was no extra money hidden between the pages. And they would often ask if you had any ■■■■ books which they tended to confiscate, allegedly.
When the Vam man had finished you would lock up your cab and walk into the customs hall. Along the back wall were several offices each with a door and a small window. One of the things that always stood out at most of these Commie Block border posts was that all the curtains looked like they had never been washed for years. In fact some of the curtains looked like they were well overdue an oil change.
The four of us stood at one of the little windows where the curtain was closed. We waited for a couple of minutes and then John gave a gentle knock on the window. The curtain was immediately pulled open and a customs man who was sat at a desk on the inside stared out at us for about ten seconds and then quickly closed the curtain. That’s it said Frank, you have upset him now we will have to wait for ages. John was apologetic and said I only did it to make sure that somebody was in there. Maybe he is on his tea break I suggested but there was nothing that we could do but wait.
We were the only four trucks at the border but there were about six cars waiting to exit Hungary. The guards seemed to be letting in six cars at a time into the custom compound. After surrendering their passports all the occupants had to take all their suitcases and belongings into the customs hall. In the middle of the room was a table which was about fifty foot long.
Everybody in the cars even the children were ushered into the room and were told to line up with their cases and bags in front of them. When the people in the last car came in the customs men told them to put all of their belongings on the table in front of them, open all their cases and step back.
Two customs men went along rummaging through the bags and emptying nearly all the suitcases onto the table. When he had got to the end of the line he told them that the inspection had finished and that they could all repack their bags. What was surprising was that nobody seemed to bat an eyelid and just got on with repacking their cases like they had all done it before. It was interesting to note that all the cars had Hungarian registration numbers and I wondered if they would of done this to any of the Western tourists.
The curtain at the window was pulled open and a sliding window was slid to one side. There was a small shelf in front of the window and we had placed all our carnet T.I.R’.s on it and placed our Hungarian Road Permit inside them. The customs man picked up the top one and pointed to Frank as if to say is this yours. Frank gave him his which was the second one, the customs man put the top one back on the pile, slammed the window shut and closed the curtain. After about two minutes the curtain opened again, the window opened and the customs man said “Open T.I.R.”. Frank said “Ja, Open T.I.R. The window slammed shut and the curtain was pulled across. After another two minutes the curtain was pulled back, the window opened and the customs man said “Grenze”. Frank said “Nix Grenza off load Budapesta”.
We never usually offered our permits unless they asked for them, if they forget to stamp them then that was our good fortune but on this occasion we wanted the permit stamping.
We then put Lee’s carnet and permit on the top of the pile and as Lee was carrying on to Rumania he asked the customs man to put Nagylak as his exit border. John and myself requested the Hungarian/Yugoslavian border at Letenye.
The opening of the curtain and the window carried on until all our carnets had been stamped.
While we were waiting, we paid a visit to another of the small windows, this one belonged to the Hungarian Tourist Board and it was compulsory to change certain amount of Western currency into Hungarian Forint’s which was the local currency. I think that it only worked out to be about £3 a day and I can’t remember when this practice stopped as we certainly didn’t have to change currency in later years.
Eventually we all went outside and one of the squaddies climbed up and put a seal on each door of all the tractors. We were given our passports back and told that everything was finished. One soldier waved to another soldier who was stood outside a sentry box next to a barrier and when we started our engines up the barrier was raised. We drove out of the border post and headed towards the town of Sopron. It had taken them an hour and a half to clear our four trucks, they sometimes did up to twelve trucks an hour. There was nothing that we could do about it, it was just another part of the job that we all had to accept.
If I might just drift off for a minute (again) can you remember when The Rubik Cube became very popular in the early 80’s ?
Well I had seen it done once on the television, in a couple of minutes and as they were selling them at Corley Services on the M6 while I was on my way to Dover I decided to buy one. I was certain that on the four and a half hour ferry crossing to Zeebrugge then I would of mastered it by then. By the time that we arrived in Zeebrugge I was in two minds whether to throw it into The English Channel or to try and work it out after I had calmed down a bit.
Three days later I was at the Czechoslovakian/ Hungarian border at Komarno sitting in the queue waiting to get into the customs compound. I was still messing about with that bloody Rubicks Cube and I had decided to take it back to Corley Services and get my money back as it obviously didn’t work. I left it on the dashboard as the queue moved up and we went in to do our customs documentation. Eventually, a young Hungarian customs man climbed into my cab to do a cabin control, he pointed at the cube and asked if he could have a go. Of course, I said smiling while I handed it to him, I thought that there was no way that he would be able to do it and wondered if he had ever seen one before.
I was astounded when he completed it in less than two minutes and I asked him how he knew how to do it. He said that when he was at school Doctor Rubick was my professor and he showed me. It was the first time that I had realised that The Rubicks Cube was actually named after somebody. Mind you, I had been using a Biro since I was school and had never realised that it was also named after another Hungarian Lazlo Biro.
Just off the T.I.R. road as you went through Sopron there was a fuel station that Billy Jones, who was another one of our drivers had shown me on my first trip to Hungary. Billy had persuaded me to buy 100 litres of fuel coupons legally at the border, the reason being that if we pulled into a garage and the police caught us filling up with black market diesel then we could always show them the coupons and pretend that we thought that each coupon was worth 100 litres and not 10 litres. The trick was to never use the coupons and just use them as a back up in an emergency, which is what I did.
Billy and I had both fuelled up and paid in West German Marks which basically was against the law but you could make a tidy profit if you bought your fuel on the black market. I never felt guilty about buying my diesel on the black market in any of the Soviet Union countries. If their civilian population really needed foreign currency that badly then I was happy to help them. There was a risk to it which could have been that you might of ended up in jail so you had to be careful. Not every garage would let you have fuel without the coupons but there were a lot of Hungarians who wanted ‘Hard Currency’, especially West German Marks.
It was never a good idea to have more than one truck on the garage forecourt at the same time, so I pulled in first while the others waited around the corner. I waited until the attendant was on his own and I asked him if I could buy diesel with Deutsch Marks. He asked me had I got coupons and when I said no he looked around and said O.K. one hundred marks = 300 litres. That was a good rate so I said O.K. and started to fill up my tank and half way through I asked him can my colleague come. He looked at me as though to say no but when I offered him two packets of cigarettes he said O.K. so I walked over to Lee who was stood nearby and gave him the thumbs up. He walked back to where John was parked and John pulled into the garage as I pulled out. I always thought that it was a good idea to give the garage attendant a packet of ciggies whenever I filled up as you never knew when you might want to call back there again.
We had arranged that we would all meet up on a piece of waste ground on the outskirts of the town and as soon as I got there I put the kettle on.
By the time that Frank arrived it was about 5.30 p.m. and it was already dark. It had been a long day, we had been on duty for over 13 hours but we had achieved what we set out to do and that was to get out of Austria before the week end ban had come into force. This allowed us to do another full days work on the Sunday and hopefully get us another step towards home for Christmas. I took out my Tacho card and put a new one in as I didn’t think that we were going to go any further that day.
We all agreed to call it a day and to park up there for the night so as Lee’s and my cab were next to each other Frank got into Lee’s cab and John got into mine and as we were in Hungary and it was getting cold we decided to make our own Camion Goulash. Well actually it turned out to be more of an Irish Stew with a teaspoonful of Paprika powder in it but it was hot and edible and with a carton of Heineken beer to wash it down I can’t remember anybody complaining.
The next morning Frank knocked on my door at about 9 a.m. and asked for my cup, it was raining and I could hear Lee’s night heater clicking away next to me and I thought you lucky (z.b.)
Frank brought his packet of prepacked bacon and we had egg and bacon sandwiches for Sunday breakfast. Everybody liked a bacon sandwich on a Sunday morning, I don’t know if it was a tradition or it just reminded us of home and it was always good idea to use all the bacon up once you had opened the packet.
We would all be splitting up here, Frank and his Scania would be going as far as Budapest and Lee would go with him and then he would carry on to the Rumanian border and go to wherever it was that he had to deliver. John and his Transcon and myself would be heading towards Lake Balaton and then making our way towards the Yugoslavian border at Letenye.
It was about 10 a.m. by the time that we had said our good byes and set off, I led the way and John followed behind me. Church bells rang out and there seemed to be plenty of people in their Sunday best clothes who looked like they were on their way or who had been to church. Most of the shops were closed and it looked like the Hungarians still classed Sunday as a day of rest.
But not for John and me, it took us almost four hours to cross Hungary before we reached the Yugoslav border. It had been dull and overcast with lots of rain which had made the going slow.
As we were the only trucks at the Hungarian border it took us about half an hour to get through. It was just like most of the other communist border crossings with the West, armed soldiers, high barbed wire fences and there always a feeling that you were being watched.
On the Yugoslav side things were a lot more relaxed, in fact some of their customs posts reminded me of entering a South American Banana Republic. They would always have a Yugoslavian flag flying which had red, white and blue horizontal stripes with big red star in the centre. There might have been the odd soldier around, a couple of policemen and a couple of customs officers in their grey uniforms who often looked untidy. The things that have stood out in my mind after all these years is that I can remember seeing them on a few occasions with their feet on the desks and their caps pushed to the back of their heads with their jackets unbuttoned. On more than one occasion I can remember a Yugo customs man giving me a plumb seal and the pliers and sending me out to seal myself just because he seemed too lazy to come out of his warm office.
The Yugo side only took about 15 minutes to clear and John and I pulled onto the truck parking area next to the border post to have a brew and decide how for we would go that night.
We only had a couple of hours driving time before it would start to get dark and it was never a good idea to drive anywhere in the commie block at night unless you really had to. Unlit horse and carts plodding along the roads, tractors with no lights on, drunken drivers and large pot holes were always there a plenty.
It was a toss up between parking at The Zagreb Hotel in Zagreb that night or pushing on to Karlovac.
Myself in BFE155S in winter with my home made heavy duty thick curtains. (When we all dreamt of having a night heater).
Budapest.
YUGO CHRISTMAS 4.
In the end we decided to give The Zagreb Hotel a miss and carry on to Karlovac as an extra hours driving tonight would be an hours less driving tomorrow. It had already turned 3 p.m. by the time that we had our break and Karlovac was at least another two hours drive.
We knew that we still had about 550 kilometres to go before we got to Split and that it would probably be late on Monday night or even Tuesday morning before we arrived there. Ahead of us lay some very long hills and some very bad stretches of road where we would be lucky to average about 60 k.p.h. with the weight that we had on, especially as now the rain which had been with us all day had now turned to sleet.
We must of parked up sometime between 5p.m. and 6p.m. on the Sunday night, John got in my cab as there was a lot more room to move about in the M.A.N. compared to the Ford Transcontinental. I can’t remember what we cooked in the cab for dinner but I do remember that I woke up in the middle of the night and that I had to start the engine up as I was bloody freezing, John’s engine started up shortly afterwards.
John’s engine started up again at about 7 a.m. the next morning and this is what woke me up. I pulled the curtains back and I wasn’t too surprised to see that the whole area was covered in snow. It was only about an inch covering but in countries like this you didn’t often see many gritters or snow ploughs unless you were on the Autoput.
My kettle seemed to take ages to boil which was a signal that the gas inside the gas bottle was starting to freeze even though it had been inside the cab all night and if the gas was starting to freeze then the diesel was also likely to start freezing. When this happened the diesel in the tank would start to turn into a waxy solution, the fuel filter would clog up and the fuel pump would have trouble getting the fuel into the injectors. We would need to buy some fuel anyway as we didn’t have belly tanks so we would have to find a bank to exchange some £’s into Yugoslav Dinars.
Yugoslavia wasn’t as strict as all the other communist countries, in fact the people were quite free, a lot of them went to work in West Germany as Guest Workers. In fact Yugo was quite westernised although it was still a few years behind the west.
As far as I was aware there wasn’t much of a black market, some places would except West German Marks for diesel but you didn’t gain that much.
Marshal Tito, who ruled Yugoslavia from the end of the war until seven months previous, he died in May 1980, had allowed his citizens to travel freely abroad. Visitors to Yugoslavia didn’t need a visa and could now just get their passport stamped as they entered the country. Tito, apparently, kept the six states of Yugoslavia together and some people say that he ruled with an iron fist. If you read about him on Google it seems that he did have a secret police force, which is no surprise but what did surprise me was that Yugoslavia in the early fifties had the fourth biggest army in Europe or so it said.
When Tito died in the May of that year they had four days of national mourning and his body was taken on a train across the country. Apparently, it was stated in their national papers that thousands of people waited along the railway lines for hours waiting for the train carrying Marshal Tito’s body to pass.
We had a couple of drivers who were parked up in Zagreb and Belgrade and were told by the police that they couldn’t drive for four days,……or so they said.
If ever you looked closely at a Yugoslav Road Permit, (the one that was issued in Newcastle), which was on white paper, you would of seen that there was a flower embossed into the paper. This flower had six petals, each petal represents one of the states that made up The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia or the S.F.R.Y. which were Bosnia Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia.
Now, looking back a couple of pages I should of mentioned that we had to show our Yugoslavian Road Permits when we had crossed the border at Letenya the day before but I have just remembered an incident that occurred a couple of years later while we were entering Yugoslavia but I can’t remember which border it was at the time.
Three of Dow’s drivers, no names, no pack drills, were waiting to do their paperwork and had arranged that whoever finished first would drive out of the customs area, park up on the lorry park on the other side and put their kettle on. Two of them had cleared customs and sat waiting for the third driver to arrive and after waiting nearly an hour they were starting to get a bit worried about him when he finally turned up.
They asked him what the delay was about and he asked them to show him their Yugo permits. When they compared the three permits they were surprised to find that two of them had permits with six petals on the flower and his had seven petals on his flower, strange that and it cost him a bottle of whisky to sort the problem out.
Why I seem to have gone off on a tangent is because I have just heard that Zsa Zsa Gabor has died aged 99 and it reminded me of a story that I heard many years ago. I think that she might of told it on the Michael Parkinson show back in the eighties and as she was born in Budapest it has always stuck in my mind. Apologise if all the details are not 100% correct as it was a long time ago when I heard it but the gist of the story was that
Zsa Zsa owned a Rolls Royce and decided to drive into Yugoslavia to see what the country was like. After about an hour she smashed into a bloke who was riding a push bike and his leg was badly hurt. She stopped to help him as it was her fault that the accident had happened and wanted to pay him some compensation but the guy looked stunned and limped away very quickly and disappeared.
Zsa Zsa was quite upset about this as he had left his smashed up bicycle behind and she wanted to buy him a new one. So she drove to the local police station to report the accident and spoke to a senior policeman who said “don’t worry about it we will never see him again”.
Zsa Zsa asked the policeman how was he so sure about this and he replied. “ The only person who drives a Rolls Royce in Yugoslavia is Marshal Tito and if somebody riding a bicycle had hit his car then he would probably of had him shot”.
Anyway, back to the trip, John and I found a bank in one of the places that we were passing and went to change some money. Then we did a bit of shopping, we bought a couple of loaves and some tomatoes and for some reason we could never seem to find sliced bread, so whenever we cut a slice as we didn’t have a bread knife the slices always appeared to be about an inch thick. In the shop that we were in they seemed to sell a bit of everything. Bread, vegetables, wheelbarrows, candles, bicycle tyres, shovels, Hurricane lamps, paraffin etc but the thing that I remember the most was the women’s bra’s. They were hung up next to the counter and I have never seen or imagined that a bra could be so big. If a woman had basket ball ■■■■■ then that was the shop that they should of gone to.
We then found a garage and along with the diesel we put in some petrol to stop the diesel from freezing up. I think it was something like 5 litres of petrol to 100 litres of diesel. What I should of done was to buy some diesel anti freeze additive while we were in Austria but at the time it hadn’t crossed my mind.
Yugoslavia is a very mountainous country and back then you could look at the map and think, 150 kilometres, that should take me about two hours and with experience you got to learn that in some places that it would take you nearer to three hours.
You could get stuck behind a tractor or a horse and cart and have to wait ten minutes before you could find a place to safely overtake it.
I remember on a couple of occasions while I was going down the Dalmatian Coast road when I came to a bay next to the sea. I could see the road that I was heading for as it was the only road in the area but from one side of the bay to the other took about 45 minutes. We had decided that rather than take the road across the mountains we would try and get to the coast road as we knew that the weather would be milder and there would be less chance of snow, or so we thought.
Somewhere between Plitvice and Zadar there had been an accident somewhere in front of us. We had seen the police car and the ambulance come and go but we had lost about two hours. There was nothing that we could do, it had started sleeting which was better than it snowing but there was nowhere that we could of turned around or taken a diversion.
It was about time for lunch anyway and as John was leading we sat in his cab while he made our lunch. Eventually the traffic started creeping forward and it was about five minutes before we came to the scene of the accident. It had looked like a Yugo car had tried to overtake something and had smashed into a old lorry driving on the opposite side of the road. From the state of the car it would have been amazing if anybody had survived.
Most of that day was spent driving up in the clouds or in the mist and it was dark by the time that we arrived near the Port of Zadar.
It must of been about 7p.m. by then and we still had about 140 kilometres to go but after making a late dinner we decided to push on for another hour and to make a six o’clock start the next morning. It was bloody cold that night and for a lot of the time we must of left our engines running to try and keep the cab warm.
John gave me a call the next morning, my sleeping attire in the winter was usually a pair of thick hiking socks, Trakky bottoms, a tee shirt, a jumper and if it was really cold a Beanie hat. Quite often when I got up I would put my moon boots on, get out of the cab and have a quick look around the lorry, have a quick pee, get into the driving seat and after about twenty minutes of driving when the cab and my blue Camping Gaz bottle had warmed up a bit then I would stop to make a cup of coffee and have a slice of toast.
As it was so cold that morning this was one of those times, the ice cold rain and sleet had been falling all night long and the wind on a couple of occasions had been that strong that it had rocked the cab and woken me up.
John was leading and even though he had never been here before he found the entrance to the docks that we were delivering to straight away. We both got out and took our C.M.R.’s with our delivery address and our contact details into the docks gatehouse. I can’t remember which clearing agent we used that day but often than not we used Inter-Europa when we were in the north of Yugo and Jug Sped when were tipping or loading in the south.
We showed the gatehouse man our contact telephone number and after a conversation of him saying Ja, Dobra, Dobra, Ja and Dobra Dan with somebody on the phone he pointed at his watch and we guessed that somebody would be here to see us in about twenty minutes. The gatehouse man told us to park over by a large warehouse and we waited until the agent turned up in his little Yugo car.
He spoke fairly good English and told us to follow him through the docks where he parked us up near a large ship. After asking for our Carnet T.I.R’.s and our C.M.R. he told us that he would come back between mid day and 2p.m. with the customs man.
We asked him if he could send a telex for us to Dow to ask for our reloading instructions and he told us to write down their number and a message. We usually wrote something like Steve and John with trailers D28 and D34 (all the trailer numbers began with a D) expecting to offload this afternoon request reload instructions please.
John still had a packet of prepacked bacon so we put it to good use by making bacon and tomato sandwiches on slices of bread that were about an inch thick. Most drivers used to do a lot of cooking in the cab but frying bacon was one thing that I never liked doing. It was better to do it outside on the catwalk or on the battery box or even on the fuel tank but if it was raining like it was that day then you had to put a lid on the pan or else it would spit all over the place. There was not much that we could do while we waited for the agent to return, there was no point in walking around in the icy cold rain. Even the Docker’s were keeping out of it, they seemed to be working in twenty minute shifts.
The ship that we were parked next to was an Iranian freighter, I can’t remember the name of it but I do recall that it was registered in Bandar Abbas. A couple of people walked over to have a look at our tractors and then went up the gangway onto the ship. We didn’t think that our four tractors were going to Iran as we heard that the United Nations had placed trade sanctions on Iran at the time but it did cross our minds that maybe there final destination wasn’t going to be Yugoslavia after all.
When we were doing a job like this we all knew that it involved plenty of waiting time and we would have at least four hours to wait. We had three choices, read a book, keep on drinking tea or get some sleep, we both decided on the latter choice.
At 2p.m. John and I waited for the agent who along with a customs man didn’t turn up until 3p.m. The customs man gave me a penknife and told me to climb up on the trailer and to cut off all the seals on all the doors. He then compared the numbers on the seals with the numbers on the pages of T.I.R. Carnets, he then scribbled something down, tore out a page and gave the carnets back to the agent.
The agent told us to follow him and along with the customs man we drove over to where there was a ramp. The agent told us to back up to the ramp and take the chains off. A couple of the Dockers came over to watch us. As John was backing onto the ramp the agent gave me both of the carnets and our C.M.R’.s which I double checked to make sure that they were all stamped and signed. He also gave me the reply that we received from our telex. John had to load from somewhere down near Dubrovnik and I had to load furniture up near Nova Mesto in the north.
One of the Dockers drove one the tractors off the back of the trailers, the agent said good bye and drove away with the customs man. Just then the heavens opened up and it was about fifteen minutes before the Dockers came out of their shelter.
When the rain had eased off and it looked like they weren’t going to carry on working, John asked them what the delay was and was told that they needed a packet of cigarettes before they could off load the other tractor. John gave them a packet of his duty frees which they accepted but then they said that was only for the tractor that they had already off loaded, they needed another packet if we wanted the other one taken off.
John was really annoyed but he gave them another packet of ciggies and when he had finished I backed onto the ramp. I was told that I had to give them a bottle of Whiskey or a bottle of Vodka before they would offload me and it was obvious that they were taking the ■■■■.
Now I have mentioned this to a few drivers over the years and their response has been “you should of put your chains back on and took them back to England” but things were never that simple. You had to be a bit of a diplomat at times and sometimes it was better to just give in and get on your way. So I told them that I had only six packets left to last me for a week but I was prepared to let them have three packets if they would off load me that day. I don’t know if they were trying to stretch out the overtime but it was already getting dark and I was worried that they might all be finishing work soon. The spokesman for the Dockers said O.K. and the offloading of the tractors recommenced but by this time the icy cold sleet was beginning to fall. It was about half past four in the afternoon and already it was dark, I let them have the three packets just to stop them hassling us and to get rid of them as we watched the four tractors drive away.
We started to rebuild John tilt and the sleet was coming down thick and fast. By the time that we put his sideboards back on we were both soaked through and decided to get in out of the cold and the wet. I could tell that John was in a bad mood, it had been a miserable day and the Dockers hadn’t exactly rushed about.
(Z.B.) it said John, I have had enough, I am going to spend the night in a nice warm hotel and (z.b.) the expense, what do you think. I thought that it was not a bad idea and I asked him if he had noticed that small hotel on the way into the town. He said he had and he thought that we could leave the trucks on the edge of the main road. We couldn’t sit around waiting for the sleet to stop before we could rebuild the tilts so we would have to leave it till later.
As we drove back through the docks we could see the four tractors parked next to the Iranian ship and it looked like the Dockers were putting slings on them to lift them aboard.
We drove out of the port and headed to the outskirts of the town back onto the Zadar road. We parked the trucks just before the hotel on the hard shoulder, we locked them up and walked into the hotel to find out if they had a room and how much it would cost for the night. It wasn’t a flashy hotel, they did have a room available with two beds and the price wasn’t that expensive. Because we were foreigners we had to fill out a form and surrender our passports which they locked in a safe behind the reception desk. We were given a key and told the room number which was upstairs at the back of the two storeys hotel.
Winter at The National Hotel, Belgrade, Yugoslavia.
One of the Ford Transcontinentals on it’s home from Turkey.
YUGO CHRISTMAS 5.
The room was a bit basic but it looked clean and comfortable, it had a shower and a television that looked like it was showing the same programme on every channel in Serbo Croat or what ever language they were speaking.
I opened the curtains to look out of the window to see what kind of a view was on offer. There was a grassed area for about thirty feet and then a road which ran parallel to the hotel, beyond this there seemed to be open fields stretching off into the darkness. Directly opposite our window next to the road was an old style street lamp which was about twenty feet tall. On top of this lamp post was a large clear glass ball with an orange sodium bulb inside it and as the sleet was still falling this sodium bulb gave everything a soft orange glow.
I suggested to John that it might be a good idea if we moved the trucks away from the main road at the front and parked them around the back where we could keep an eye on them. John agreed as we had to go back down to the trucks to get our washing gear and some clean clothes.
We drove round the back of the hotel where John parked his truck just past the lamp post, I stopped right behind him with my cab in line with our hotel window. As the sleet had now stopped and we had plenty of light we decided to fit all the side boards back onto the trailers. I got together some of my clean clothes and my washing bag before closing my curtains and locking up the cab. Then we walked back to the hotel, it was still freezing cold and I congratulated John on making a good choice of staying in the hotel.
When we got back into our room we both had a shower, got changed into our ‘going out gear’ and went down to the restaurant in the hotel. While we having dinner we talked about what we would be doing the following day. John had loaded once before at the furniture factory where I was to reload and told me that the place was in a forest up in the hills. He told me to look out for the place on the left hand side just before I reached the village. John said that I would probably be loading tables and chairs and warned me that as every single piece of furniture was loaded by hand then it had taken him most of the day to load. He was also under the impression that as they made the items they would wrap them in corrugated paper and tie them together. The place that I had to deliver them to in Dudley would assemble the chairs and varnish them. I can’t remember exactly what John had to reload but I do know that he had to travel south towards Dubrovnik and that the next day we would be travelling in different direction than me.
John came up with an idea and with him doing the job a little longer than I had and with him being slightly older than me I always listening to what the more experienced drivers had to say. His idea was that we got up at 4 a.m. in the morning, we went down to the trucks and we rebuilt both of the trailers. It was obvious that we would be getting dirty so after we had finished we could go back up to our room and have a shower. We could also have a full breakfast in the restaurant before we set off, this sounded like a good idea to me so I agreed with him.
It wasn’t too late that night by the time that we went to bed and I remember that as I walked into our room even before I switched the light on the room was lit by an orange glow from the street lamp outside the window. I walked over and opened the curtains to look at the trucks, outside was quite and peaceful. We had a great view of the trucks, the snow was falling and was now beginning to settle on the ground.
I set my alarm for 4 a.m. but when we had got into our beds and switched the light off the room was still filled with an orange glow from the outside. It didn’t take long for me to get to sleep in that nice warm room and on that comfortable spring mattress bed, with that big thick duvet quilt.
What happened next is something that has always stuck with me over all the years. I can remember it so clearly like it was only yesterday as it was more of a feeling than an experience.
The alarm went off at 4 a.m. and I switched it off immediately as we didn’t want to wake up everybody in the hotel. I looked out of the window, the snow had stopped but it must of snowed through out the night as everywhere was covered in about four inches of snow. We got dressed and made our way very quietly down the stairs where the reception was dimly lit. The night porter was asleep with his head lying on his arms which were folded on the reception desk. He was softly snoring and John looked at me as if to say that we would have to wake him up before we could get out. I tried the front door and much to our surprise it was unlocked so we crept out like two thieves in the night hoping not to attract any attention.
We walked around to the back of the hotel and made our way over to the trucks. I opened my cab door and put on my overalls, my moon boots and my Volvo jacket, my work gloves as well as my flat cap.
Everywhere was so still and quiet you could hear a pin drop so John and I whispered to each other as we climbed up on to his trailer. We both stood on one of the side doors on each side of the trailer and got a grip of the squashed up tilt sheet. We both tried very hard to pull it at the same time but it would just not move. I hit the sheet with one of the wooden tilt boards but it was stuck solid. We could tell by the sound that it made that the whole sheet was frozen together and we just couldn’t pull the sheet forward.
John came up with another idea, we could see the eyelets on the back flap of the tilt cover and he suggested that if we could thread a rope through them then we might be able to get a bit more leverage by pulling on the rope. This is what we did but it was no use, the sheet was frozen solid and would not move and the weather felt like it was getting even colder.
John said that if we anchor the rope around the front towing pin on my bumper bar and he drove very slowly forward then that might work. I disagreed as I thought that the angle of the rope would pull the tilt cover down inside the tilt and we might struggle with the weight of it to get it back over the sides again.
Then John had what I would of called a light bulb moment. He suggested that if we tied the rope near the top of the lamp post, about the same height as the tilt and he then drove very slowly forward then the tilt cover might become unstuck. I thought that this could be plausible but I would have to keep a close eye on the eyelets to make sure that they weren’t torn out of the tilt cover.
John threw the end of the rope as far as he could up and around the street lamp and tied it off, the other end of the rope was still threaded and tied through the eyelets. I stood on the side boards watching the rope and the eyelets. As I was looking down I noticed how nice the snow looked with an orange tinge from the sodium street light. John started the engine up on the Ford Transcontinental and moved very slowly forward, gradually the slack on the rope began to tighten. He kept crawling forward ever so slowly but the tilt cover just wasn’t moving, in fact nothing was happening except the snow on the ground seem to be looking more of a deeper orange colour. I rubbed my eyes as I still felt a bit sleeper due to the time of the morning and John shouted up in a hushed kind of a voice “is anything happening”. “No” I said, nothing but I was more concerned why my eyes were playing tricks with the orange snow. Why did the snow look like it was getting brighter, then I looked behind and screamed out “STOP”.
I am surprised that I hadn’t woken up everybody in Split, let alone all the people in the hotel. John switched the engine off and leapt out of his cab saying “what’s wrong”. I stared, mesmerised at the sight of the lamp post, instead of it looking like a number one, it had now taken the shape of a number seven.
What are we going to do now I asked John ?
“Get the (z.b.) out of here as fast as we can before anybody sees us” came his reply.
I undid the rope that was tied around the lamppost which was easy enough to do as it was now only about three feet high. I threw the rope into the back of John’s trailer as John got back in his cab, started up his engine and drove away. I started my engine and pulled back all the curtains as I looked across at the back of the hotel to see if we had awoken anybody. Then I followed John’s tyre tracks around to the front of the hotel where he was parked up. We couldn’t just drive off into the night because they still had our passports in the hotel. I parked up behind John who came walking towards me and said “close your curtains and we will creep back into the hotel.”
At the hotel we looked in through the front window, the night porter was still asleep so we very quietly opened the door and crept in. We reached the bottom of the stairs to see that we had left our wet boot prints across the floor in the reception area. So we took our boots off and made our way upstairs to our room in our stocking feet without saying a word to each other. It was dark in our room and we quietly closed the door and made our way over to the window.
We looked out to see the 90 degree lamp post and it did look sad. What had half an hour ago looked like a beacon of hope now looked like a beacon of despair. John said “look on the bright side, at least it’s still working” and we both started giggling that much that I though that the people in the next room were going to bang on the wall and tell us to get some sleep.
If the Gestapo come knocking on the door asking questions said John, then we will just tell them that we know nothing about those two Belgium drivers who were parked there last night. We might not of built our tilts up but we had earned ourselves another two hours in a nice warm bed.
We got up at 7a.m. we both had a hot shower and went down for breakfast. Nobody said anything to us at the reception when we checked out and got our passports back.
John and I said our good byes as we started up our engines and set off for our loading destinations. The weather was only slightly warmer and there was even glimpses of the sun on occasions. I passed by the town of Zadar where I started to head away from the coast and as I knew that it should be a bit milder nearer the coast I decided to have a go at rebuilding the tilt before I started climbing towards the mountains.
I put my overalls on and got stuck in, the tilt cover eventually unravelled but there were still pieces of ice inside where the tilt had been folded. It had taken me over an hour and a half to build the tilt back up which was an hour and half driving time that I had lost before it got dark.
I found a garage where I filled up and put some more petrol in as I didn’t want the diesel to start waxing up.
As it was now Wednesday the 17th of December it really was time to start thinking about Christmas as it was only seven days to Christmas Eve, I had a long way to go and I still wasn’t loaded for home.
There was a song that Jimmy Young and Terry Wogan had been playing a lot on Radio Two just before I had left the U.K. and I couldn’t get the chorus out of my head as it was ‘I wish I was going home for Christmas’ by Jona Lewie.
youtube.com/watch?v=2HkJHApgKqw
It was now about 8 p.m. on a cold dark night and I had climbed near the top of a hill somewhere, I had been fiddling with the controls on the radio when I think I picked up Radio Free Europe from Munich. They played about four songs and one of them was this which I couldn’t get out of my mind. I lost the radio reception as I started descending the hill.
It must have been about midnight and I was still about 100 kilometres away from the furniture factory but I wanted to push on to be on the doorstep before the morning. I never liked doing big hits through the night in the Commie Block especially if I was off the T.I.R. road but there were times when I did think that it was necessary which of course if never really was. If you missed a load or a ferry then it would never of been the end of the world but if you ever nodded off and slipped down a hillside it could well of been.
I came to the sign indicating the village that I was heading for, the snow was falling and I was going uphill when the wheels started spinning. I engaged the Diff Lock and crawled up the hill, the village was about two kilometres off a major road and I knew that I hadn’t far to go.
On the left was what looked like a large old wooden building and I stopped outside two big wooden gates. There was a light on in the room next to the gate and suddenly the door opened and the figure of a man could be seen in the doorway. As it was 2.30 a.m. in the morning I was surprised to see anybody about at that time as I had only seen about six other vehicles in the last four hours. I got out of the cab and walked over to the doorway and showed the man the telex with the address on it. “Ja,Ja ist here” he said “come aus England” . “Ja England” I said and he began to open the gates, it was like he was expecting me. He pointed to me to drive in which I did and then he pointed over to a loading bay which he wanted me to back onto.
I drove around the dark snow covered yard as it was big enough to turn in a full circle and started to reverse on to the loading bay. The old guy stopped me and gestured to open the tailboard before the back of the trailer touched the bay. I switched the engine off, it was so quite but it was also so cold. The old guy pointed towards the gates, “coffee” he said but I was so tired that I just wanted to get into my sleeping bag. “Nix” I said “slaffen,” (sleep) the old man smiled at me and said “come snaps drinken”.
I smiled back and said, “Nix mooda”. (tired) He said O.K. six hour morgan laden so I said O.K. Dobra nacht. (good night). As he was about to walk away I said “moment collegea” and I gave him a packet of cigarettes for being helpful. “Ah Englander very good chauffers” he said as he walked away through the snow looking very happy.
I kicked my shoes off and climbed onto the top bunk without even closing the curtains knowing that they would start loading me at six o’clock the next morning. The cab was still warm as I watched the snow falling for a few minutes just before I crashed into a very deep sleep.
Somebody was banging on the door at half past seven just as it was starting to get light. I was still fully dressed and had managed to pull the sleeping bag over me during the night as it was cold inside the cab. The person outside was beckoning me to come with him and pointed to the buildings across the yard. I put my thick Volvo jacket on and my moon boots and as it was still snowing I put my woollen beanie on. We walked over to the office and a young girl said “you have come to load for Dudley, England, yes”. I said yes and she replied “we will load you today”. I asked what time they would finish and she said “ after lunch time about four o’clock”. Well, I thought, John did warn me that it might take all day. Then she said “go with this man, he will look after you”.
I followed the man who didn’t appear to speak any German and he led me into a large room that was used as a canteen. He pointed for me to sit at a table and went to speak with one of the cooks behind the counter who came over with a large bowl and a spoon which she placed in front of me. She then went back to the kitchen and brought out a plate of what looked like a sliced baguette. Then she brought out a bigger bowl with a ladle that she carried with two handles and placed it on the table and spooned out what looked like a very thick bean broth into my bowl. She said “guten appetite” as she walked away leaving the bowl in front of me.
Now usually I was very funny about the things that I ate whenever I was abroad but this looked and smelt fantastic. The spoon wasn’t made of stainless steel but more like a kind of tin as it felt flimsy. The bowl looked like it was made of pewter and I thought that at least I should try a bit because of their hospitality. It was delicious, there were several kinds of beans in there in fact it was more like a bean stew with lumps of smoked ham in it. I could only recognise butter beans and kidney beans but whatever else was in there tasted so good, it certainly kept the cold out.
The bread was still warm and must of only just come out of the oven and as I was about to finish the cook came over and said “noch more”, as I said “Ja bitte’ she filled my bowl up again.
I have never in my life ever tasted a bean stew that was as delicious as that in that furniture factory in Yugoslavia on that cold winters morning.
I asked the cook how much and she said “alles frei” I thanked her and went back to the truck to see how the loading was going, it was going slowly, very slowly. I got back into the cab and started the engine up for fifteen minutes while I went to the loo. When I got back the cab was warm so I switched the engine off and lay on the top bunk and went back into a deep sleep.
YUGO CHRISTMAS 6.
I must of woken up about lunchtime, nobody had knocked on my cab inviting me for lunch so it looked like I was going to be missing out on another bowl of that bean broth. I looked into the back of the trailer and it looked as though it was over three quarters of the way full. I picked up my documents folder with my spare carnet T.I.R. and blank C.M.R. and made my way over to the office. I asked the girl who spoke English did she want to fill in my carnet and she replied “no that must be filled in by the shipping agent, Inter Europa in Zagreb”.
Zagreb, I replied, isn’t the customs man going to come here. I never asked John where he had cleared customs when he had loaded here. “No” said the girl, “you must be at the customs tomorrow morning in Zagreb and report to the Inter Europa office who will do the customs formalities for you and complete your carnet. When you are loaded I shall give you all the invoices and the paperwork for you to give to the agent”.
Bugger, I thought that as soon as I was loaded I could be on my way home but now I had to make my way across to Zagreb. It was only about 80 kilometres from where I was to Zagreb but I knew that I wouldn’t finish doing the customs until after midday, maybe even by two o’clock and that would mean that I wasn’t going to get across Austria before the week end driving ban came into force.
As luck would have it, I finished loading at about 3p.m. I laced up the tilt, collected my invoices and made my way slowly down the hill from the factory to the major road. I drove for about half an hour before I picked up the main Ljubljana to Zagreb road. As this was one of the main T.I.R. roads through Yugoslavia it was usually kept clear of snow but there were still patches of black ice around.
I hadn’t been driving for more than forty minutes when I noticed a police car parked in a lay-by up ahead. There were two policemen stood there and I had a feeling that they were going to stop me and they did. One of them walked out towards the road and started waving what we all called a lollypop to slow me down. The lollypop was what the school traffic wardens or The Stop and Go Men use except the ones that the police used on the Continent were only about three feet long and some of them would light up with the word ’STOP’ at night time. I slowed down, pulled into the lay-by and parked behind their dark blue car which had a white stripe and the word Malicja written along the side and on the bonnet.
I knew that I hadn’t been speeding, trucks were only allowed to do 70 k.p.h. along this stretch of the road and some of the conditions on that afternoon didn’t make sense to start speeding.
I sat there in the right hand drivers seat waiting as I always did to see the cop walk casually up to the left hand side of the cab, climb on the step and stare through the window to see that there was no driver sat there. It usually took a few seconds for the cops to realise that this wasn’t a left hand drive truck and it always pleased me that the cops felt a bit embarrassed when they realised that they had made a mistake.
He walked around to my side as I opened the door “Tachograph,” he said. I opened the tacho and gave him the card. “Problema” he said. “What problema” I asked. “Speedink”. I knew that I hadn’t been speedink or even speeding and I also knew that I wasn’t going to win this one. I tried to explain, “here is 70, as I pointed to the road, on tacho card ist nix 70”.
“Tacho ist Kaput” said the cop “fife hundred Dinars, factura, drie hundred Dinars nix factura. I think that there might have been about 70 Yugo Dinars to the £ at the time so the cop wanted about £7 for the fine and he would give me receipt or else I paid him about £4 without a receipt.
I told him that I had no Yugoslav Dinar on me and that I was just on my way to the bank so he asked me had I got any West German Marks. I said that I only had Romanian Lei and Polish Zloty with me so he asked had I got any cigarettes. I gave him a packet of Rothmans and he said two packets, one for his collega. This was the reason why we were always able to claim an extra £5 a trip when we did our expenses to pay for our duty frees. The best part was that if you did a trip and you didn’t need them, then you kept them.
I made my way to the Zagreb Hotel where most of the western trucks stopped when they were in the area. I can’t remember there being any British trucks there that night but there was one of Josef Meyer from Osnabruck, West Germany and a Dutchman driving for Jan De Laly who had both been collecting garments from around the area.
Dow driver Roy Kershaw with Robert, the son of Dave Shawcross.
We used to do a lot of hanging garments out of the Commie Block and when you were loading up to three thousand men’s suits it would sometimes take a day or two to load.
A lot of the factories where the clothes were made were often in small towns where they were one of the few places of employment for miles around. The were all run by the state sometimes working three shifts operating 24 hours a day.
I was once loading men’s overcoats in a place near Bucharest in Romania, it was a nice warm summers day and I was sat out next to the truck when I heard a lot of shouting going on at the back of the truck. There was a supervisor waving his arms around and shouting at two young girls who were probably in their early twenties. The interpreter was also there and was pointing inside one of the overcoats when the two young girls both burst out crying. When everything had calmed down I asked the interpreter what had happened and she told me that one girl had not sown a label into one of the coats. The quality control person had spotted this and had called the supervisor who fined the girl one day’s pay for making this mistake. The quality control girl had then argued with the supervisor for being too hard with the girl. The supervisor then fined the quality control girl two days pay for arguing with him.
Life under Nicholae Ceausescu who was the General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party at the time was terrifying for the populace of Romania.
There were always queues outside the shops, in fact most of the shops looked empty. A lot of the village’s didn’t have electricity and some of the buses ran on gas and had like a big sausage shaped gas bag on the roof of the buses, something that I had only ever seen in London on the old films of World War Two.
There would be queues of dozens of cars waiting outside a fuel station and when you passed two days later the same cars were still there and the queue had got longer and yet Romania was an oil producing country.
One thing that really upset me when I read about it was that Nicholae Ceausescu son lost over $1,000,000 in one night in a casino in Monte Carlo and the Romanian people were at times starving.
I always felt sorry for the Romanians but Romania was one of the countries that I really enjoyed going to and when we went to Brasov in Transylvania where we would often load tractors you went through some little villages that looked like a scene from a medieval play.
That night in Zagreb, I went into the hotel for a meal and probably had the mixed grill as I often did but after a couple of beers I decided to have an early night.
The next morning, I was up at 7 a.m. and drove straight round to the customs. I went over to the InterEuropa office and gave them all my paperwork and then went back to my cab to make some breakfast. There didn’t seem to be as many trucks as there usually was in the customs and at 11a.m. two InterEuropa agents along with two customs men came around. One of the agents had a step ladder with him and asked me to unlace the back of my tilt. With the help of a wooden tilt board I managed to throw the back flap onto the roof of the tilt. One of the customs men climbed up the ladder and looked into the back of the trailer as far as he could. It would have been too much of an effort for him to climb into the back so he got off the ladder and said O.K.
I used the ladder to relace the tilt and to put the tilt cord through all the eyelets before I held both ends of the tilt cord together while the customs man put a seal or a plumb through the two holes on the ends. With a pair of pliers he squeezed the plumb together and wrote down the plumb number into the carnet, then they all moved along to the next truck. I knew that it wouldn’t be long now before I was cleared so I got back into the cab and made myself a cup of tea and a sandwich.
Just before mid day the agent came around with all the carnets, he sorted mine out from the pile and said that I was free to go.
I had decided to use the border into Hungary at Letenye as I was running a bit low on fuel and I knew where there was garage in a place called Nagykaniza where the attendant took Deutsch Marks, along with a packet of Rothmans that I gave him. It was about a two and a half hour drive to the border and leaving Yugo wasn’t usually a problem but there appeared to be a delay on the Hungarian side which had backed up into Yugo.
It must of taken about three hours to get through the border on both sides that night so it must have been about 7p.m. when I reached the garage. The attendant said that I could pay in Marks but that he could only let me have 250 litres for 100 Deutsch Marks which wasn’t too bad so I filled up my tank to the brim.
As it seemed to be fairly foggy I decided to park up and have an early start the next morning. I knew where there was a decent lay-by not too far away as I had used this road several times before.
The next morning I overslept and it had turned 8 a.m. by the time that I eventually got going. I was hoping that if all went well I could reach The Prater Stadium in Vienna before 3p.m. when the Austrian heavy goods vehicle driving ban came into force.
The Prater was a large amusement park near the centre of Vienna which was famous for it’s big Ferris wheel. Near by was a football stadium where all the foreign drivers who were delivering or loading around the Vienna area used to park up for the night or to spend the weekend. It was strange because all the Western European drivers like The Dutch, The West Germans, The Brits, The Greeks and The Scandinavians all used to park up on one side of the stadium and all the Commie Block countries like The Russians, The Bulgarians, The Poles, The Hungarians, The Iranians and The Turks all used to park around the other side of the stadium. If there was a football match on that day or that night the police would not let us park there and so we had to park up in the streets around the Prater Park.
It was sometime after lunch when I arrived at the customs post at Sopron and I could just see the queue of trucks in front of me stopping before the Hungarian soldier dropped the barrier down. There must have been about eight trucks in the compound and I could see in the distance right at the front a Dow Freight trailer but I couldn’t quite see what kind of unit was pulling it.
My first thoughts were that it was John and that he had passed me during the night but it might also be Lee on his way back from Rumania. I only hoped that whoever it was that they could see me in the line waiting to go into the compound and that they would wait for me on the Austrian side.
Sopron was a border that we stopped using eventually because of one of the Dow drivers who could of got the company into a lot of trouble.
Brian (Nobby) Clarke who lived somewhere near Mansfield had befriended a Hungarian in a town called Szeged in the east of the country. The man whose name was Shuster had escaped from Hungary in the 1956 uprising and eventually, as a refugee went to live in America. He took out American citizenship and later had to serve in Vietnam.
For some reason, he was allowed to return to Hungary after denouncing his American citizenship and he married an Hungarian women. They had two children, two girls and sometime later he and his wife split up and the girls went to live with him.
One day he saw Nobby offloading in Szeged where we did a lot of work and introduced himself. Nobby said they got on really well, especially as the guy could speak Hungarian and he had a friend who worked in a garage where Nobby could buy very cheap diesel. Nobby used to call in and see him if he was on his way to the Romanian border at Nagylac or the Yugoslavian border at Subotica.
Over the years they got very friendly and one day he asked Nobby if he could help him and the two girls get out of Hungary. Nobby must of said yes because one day when Nobby had loaded a trailer full of hanging garments in Szeged he drove them up to the Hungarian/Austrian border at Sopron. Three days later they all arrived in Dover where the guy and his two daughters asked for political asylum.
Nobby allowed the guy and his two girls to stay with him at his house near Mansfield (it might have been Tuxford) where the local newspaper picked up on the story. Eventually, the story was shown on (I think it was) the local television station East Midlands Today. Then the national papers picked it up and then the B.B.C.
We all thought that somebody in the Hungarian Embassy must of seen the story because on his next trip to Hungary via the border at Sopron, Nobby was refused entry.
We asked Nobby what had actually happened when he returned to the border and he said that when he had arrived at Sopron a high ranking army officer said “you have been a silly man Mr Clark, go back to Austria and don’t come back to Hungary”.
Nobby had to phone Dow to tell them what had happened and somebody was sent to Sopron to change trailers with Nobby.
When he got back to Stockport he had to go to a meeting with the bosses and they asked him about how he got the refugees out. Nobby’s answer was he took them to the border at Sopron and dropped them off inside the compound. They walked through to the Austrian side and he picked them up after he had done his customs.
Now even to this day, I don’t believe that happened and I am sure that anybody who travelled from the Commie Block into The West back then would agree with me. As this would of taken place in January/March 1980 I wonder if anybody from the Mansfield area can remember this story and what the story was that they gave to the press as I would still like to know.
Brian (Nobby) Clarke on The Rialto Bridge in Venice on a job that we both doing for The Royal Ballet about 1982.
It was over an hour before all the trucks in the compound were cleared and as they moved off I could see that it was a Ford Transcontinental that was pulling the Dow trailer. There were only two trucks in front of me and another two had joined the queue behind me and we all cleared on the Hungarian side in less than an hour.
We all left at the same time and made our way along the road to the Austrian customs post where I could see the other Dow truck parked up on it’s own. What surprised me was that it was another Dow driver called John Lockhart who was driving the Ford Transconti. John or Jock as we called him as he was born in Scotland walked over to see me and told me that he had a problem with his load. The load looked O.K. from where I was parked on his offside but he asked me to come round and have a look at the nearside.
Jock told me that he had loaded tyres in Rumania and that they mustn’t of interlocked them together properly as they were now bulging out of the tilt by about two foot. One of his tilt boards must of slipped out and the tyres were now leaning against the sheet. He had tried to phone one of the managers at home but with it being the last Saturday before Christmas they must of all been out shopping as nobody was at home.
As it was now past 2p.m. we weren’t even going to get to The Prater in Vienna before the driving ban came into force so we might as well stop there until 10p.m. on Sunday night. I asked Jock what he thought was the best thing to do and he said that he would have to go to L.K.V. Walters who were a freight agent that we sometimes used in Vienna. They could ask the customs to open him up and their warehousemen could restack the tyres.
I told him that it could cost a fortune for them to do that so I suggested that we asked the customs men where we were if they could break the seal and maybe we could crawl in and remove some of the tyres and replace the wooden tilt board. Jock wasn’t too keen on the idea but I told him that if we could do it early in the morning and the Austrian customs men could watch us from their window then we could have all day to sort the load out and lace the tyres in properly.
We walked over to the customs building where I did my Austrian documentation and I explained the situation with Jocks load but they were not interested. They said that he must drive on Sunday night to the main railway goods yard in Vienna and speak to the agents on Monday morning.
They were very uncooperative, there was not much that they would be doing from now until 10 p.m. on Sunday night except sit it their office and watch their television.
As I still had half a carton of Heineken left and a bottle of whiskey we decided to have a cab party and with any luck there was still time that Lee and John might be joining us before Sunday night.
On Sunday morning we got up each with a bit of a hangover as I never was or never have been a whiskey drinker but we had sobered up by the afternoon. We had another look at Jocks load and it was hard to tell if it was going to put any more pressure on the tilt sheet but one thing was certain and that was that it wasn’t going to get any better. We ended up by putting a couple of ropes over the tilt frame and by pulling them tight against the tyres but it wasn’t the answer to the problem.
Jock managed to contact one of the managers who told him to go to L.K.V. Walters on Monday morning to sort it out. Jock also told him that I was with him and could I also go with him to give him a hand but he said no, tell Steve to carry on and phone us from Germany on Monday so that we can book him a boat. So on Sunday night at 10 p.m. I followed Jock very slowly to Vienna where we both split up.
I had all my normal legal breaks while I was transiting Austria, the snow was falling on the Autobahns but the snow ploughs and the gritters had been out all night. I reached the border at Scharding which only took me forty minutes to clear both sides and I set off toward a truck stop called Tennenlohe near Nuremburg. It must have been about 8 a.m. when I pulled onto the truck stop and fuelled up, the weather had improved but I still bought a litre of diesel fuel antifreeze additive just in case I needed it for my next trip. I parked up and called it a day as that to me was good enough for one shift.
I parked as far away as I could from the buildings and after I had put in a new blank tacho card I walked over to the restaurant where I had a shower and then a plate of ham and eggs. When I got back to the truck I closed the curtains and went to bed.
I probably woke up at about 4p.m. which would have been 3p.m. back in the U.K. so I phoned the office to ask them to book me on a boat. I spoke to Graham Walker who was our import manager and after giving him all my details he told me that he would try and get me on a boat late Tuesday afternoon. He also told me that they would tip me as soon as I arrived in Dudley and that it would be great if I could get there as soon as possible.
I set off at 5p.m. and pushed through the night until I reached the West German/Dutch border at Heerlen. It was about 1 a.m. when I arrived there so I parked up and went into the 24 hour Les Routiers café at the border for a couple of Dutch draft beers and a meal before I went to bed. I now had plenty of time to get to Zeebrugge so by now I was feeling very pleased with myself.
At 9 a.m. I got up and went for a wash in the routiers and then I decided to have my breakfast there. After that I walked over and did my German customs and then the Dutch customs. As there was also a foreign currency exchange at the border I changed some pounds Stirling into Dutch Guilders.
There was a B.P. garage in the town of Heerlen, just off the autobahn as you left the customs and the diesel was always a bit cheaper there than it was in Germany so I went there to fill up.
Most of our lads used this garage as they always made you feel welcome and they always gave you a free cup of coffee. After I had filled up and went to pay the ■■■■■■■ the cash desk wished me a Merry Christmas and gave me a Delft tile tea pot stand as a Christmas present which we kept for many years but we never actually used it. As there was almost half a bottle of whiskey left that Jock and I didn’t want to finish I walked back into the shop and gave it to the girl along with the last packet of cigarettes that I still had which she gladly accepted as I knew that I would be buying a full bottle of spirits and a full carton of cigarettes in the duty free shop on the boat.
It was only about a three hour run from Heerlen to Zeebrugge depending on the traffic and I can’t remember having any problems on the way there. I stopped off at The Fina garage to get two cartons of Primus Belgium beer and I got a bit of a shock when I arrived in the port.
The car park and the lorry park was absolutely full with everybody trying to get back to the U.K. for Christmas. There were hundreds of private cars with their British Forces Germany registration numbers as well as all the British trucks that were on their way home
I went into the booking hall to see if Graham had made me a booking, he had but he hadn’t been able to get me on a boat until 1 a.m. the next morning. I asked the booking staff if they could get me on an earlier boat and they said that if they received a cancellation then they might bring my booking forward. As it was only 3 p.m. I realised that I had about a ten hour wait before we started boarding and so I went into the bar in the passenger terminal.
It looked like a lorry drivers convention in there, Christmas had obviously started early for all these lads who were on their way home.
Cadwallenders, Grocot International, Curries of Dumfries, Brit European, Carman’s, Bowkers, Denby’s, A1 Transport, Cawthorn Sinclair, Laser, White Trux, Berrisfords, Carr/ J.C.B. Hancocks to name but a few were having what looked like their works Christmas party.
They had to announce over the P.A. system “if the lorry drivers are not in their lanes when the boat is loading then they will lose their place on the boat”. It was a good job that the police were not breathalysing any of the drivers because 95% of them would of failed.
Two of our drivers, Tony Macloud and Tony Gibbons were both in there and as they were both booked on the 8 p.m. crossing they had also decided to join the party. It was a great atmosphere and I got the impression that some of the drivers didn’t exactly want to leave as everybody seemed to be really enjoying themselves.
It must have been about 8 p.m. by the time that I had staggered back to the truck and crashed out on the bunk. At about midnight the Townsend Thorenson boat loaders banged on the door and asked me to move over to the loading lane which I did and I sat up and watched the boat dock. About half an hour later we started loading and I was one of the first to load. I dashed upstairs and managed to book a drivers cabin and after buying my duty frees I went straight to bed.
I woke up about half an hour before the boat docked and made my way to the drivers restaurant for a cup of tea and a sausage sandwich. It was obvious that some of the drivers who had been partying in the bar in Zeebrugge had not been to bed and they had carried on drinking during the crossing.
It must have been about 6 a.m. when I had parked up in Dover Eastern docks and put my papers into the clearing agent who was D.C.S. Dover Clearing Services.
As luck would have it I was cleared by 10.30 a.m. which for Dover was not bad at all and I made my way through London and onto Toddington Services on the M1 before I had a break.
Due to all the traffic it must have been about 2.30 p.m. by the
time that I arrived in Dudley and most of the workers had already finished at lunch time and gone to the local pub.
But the boss was paying an incentive to four of them to stay back and wait to offload me. As soon as I got there I backed straight into their loading bay, unlaced the back of the tilt and jumped into the back to help them off load.
As it was all hand ball it took us about two and a half hours to off load and I set off straight away on my way to Stockport.
By the time that I had got back to the yard it was about 8 p.m., the gate was locked but I had my own key on my truck key ring.
Nearly all the units were parked inside the warehouse which I didn’t have a key for so I dropped my trailer on the trailer park and parked the unit in front of the office windows. After putting all my gear and my duty frees into my car I locked the truck up and posted the keys through the office door.
And so just before 9p.m. on Christmas Eve 1980 I arrived home and if you were wondering what happened to Jock Lockhart, I heard that Dow flew him home from Vienna and he went back after the New Year to pick his truck up.
Well mushroomman. I was just going to say that. You took the words (millions of them) right out of my mouth!!! Great post though telling it exactly as it was.
Well Mushroomman, what an outstanding memory and a great read! Fantastic stuff. Having written a memory of a New Years Eve run (strangely enough) I know that that must have taken a long time to write. Love the descriptions, especially of the ZB ferry, took me back! What a great snapshot of the way things used to be done, the border controls, dodgy cops and customs, the weather, the waiting, telex messages and freezing diesel!! Brilliant stuff and very descriptive, I just hope you have copy write to protect yourself. Are you thinking of writing a book? If not then you should do.
I will show your picture of Stan to my wife (his niece) later. She has spoken to one of Stans daughters to enquire as to the where abouts of any of his old photos but I wouldn’t hold your breath 
If they do turn up then I will post them on here.
Great stuff Steve, and I wish you and yours a happy and peaceful New Year. 
Hi Rick, don’t forget to ask her has she still got Stan’s old passports, he must of had quite a few of them so we can finally find out where about he did go to.
Happy New Year mate, I am just off to watch the fireworks. 
Best regards Steve.
mushroomman:
Hi Rick, don’t forget to ask her has she still got Stan’s old passports, he must of had quite a few of them so we can finally find out where about he did go to.
Happy New Year mate, I am just off to watch the fireworks.Best regards Steve.
Great story Steve. Just how it used to be. Happy New Year.
Having just read through this thread I thought that I would clear up the mystery of who is in the photograph.
On the left is obviously Ken Singleton. Next to him is my girlfriend Pam and next to the truck, it is me, Mick Twemlow. BJN was my truck on Pro-Motor from 1978 until 1983. The jumper that I am wearing was bought in England. I cannot remember the logo but it is not DOW. As far as I recall Dave took the photo. We had met up near Stakonice. I think that I was on my way back from Yugoslavia and they were on their way down into Hungary.
During that time, 78 - 83 I had a lot of good friends on Dow Freight. Ken was probably my best friend, but there was also Ken Corrigan, Drac, Angus McCoat-up, Cowboy, Billy Bentley, Derek Robbo’ and many more. In fact, quite often the boys used to tell me to move up North and get a job on Dow’s.
Hi my partner worked at Dow at this time as a fitter. His name is Steve, aka Smurf. I’m on here as I know he would like to get in touch with some of his old work buddies. He’s always telling me about his time there. He speaks very fondly of it.
Hello Mrs Smurf and welcome to Trucknet.
Unfortunately there are not that many of the old drivers left now as Steve must of been the youngest employee when he started in the garage back in the seventies. I can’t remember if it was him or Bunny, the other apprentice who wedged that fish in between Jock Macdonald’s heater pipes after Jock had upset him, maybe Steve can remember the incident.
I am trying to think now if Steve started working in that trailer hire place in Trafford Park when he left school, was it Central Trailer Rentals (C.T.R.) before he joined Dow.
The last I heard of Steve was that he was running his own motor on the continent which must of been sometime in the nineties I think.
Anyway it’s good to know that he is still around and I hope that he is keeping well.
Regards Steve.
The Garage.
May have asked this before, but worked with a guy at CERT (Warrington ) who drove for Dow. His name was John Wrench could have drove for a guy who had couple of trucks working for DOW at the Manchester depot, anyone able to help
Hi Boatchaser, I am afraid that his name doesn’t ring any bells with me but he may of worked for Dow before I started. There was a guy who I met once in West Germany who I think only lasted for about three months and I never saw him again but sometimes you might of only seen some of the drivers twice in a year. Sometimes you might ship out with somebody and end up doing four or five trips before you saw them again.
On one trip I arrived at a place in Yugoslavia on a Saturday morning and was told that I couldn’t tip until 8 a.m. on the Monday morning so I pulled out of the factory and parked around the back next to a little restaurant. When I drove around the front on Monday morning Tony Macloud another Dow driver was parked there, he had arrived on Saturday afternoon and didn’t know that I was in the area. 
Regards Steve.