We used to do a bit of railway sleepers and were always told they were 24 to the ton, which seemed fair enough; no one board weighers in the 80’s and doing mainly rural farm deliveries it didn’t really matter. Just after getting my new F7 wagon and drag a farmer phoned and asked if he could get a load of concrete sleepers which we didn’t have much involvement with. My Dad was away on business at the time and couldn’t be contacted so it was left to the guy in the office and my self to deal with it.
We reckoned they would probably be about 8 sleepers to the ton, and as the F7 could haul 20 tons I went to Miller Hill marshaling yards and told the guy on the forklift that I wanted 160 concrete sleepers. I was keen to see just how good the F7 would be with a full load as up until then the heaviest stuff I had on board had been empty steel drums where the top weight was about 3 tons for a full load.
I instructed him to load 70 on the Volvo and 90 on the drag, it didn’t look like much but I thought the suspension on the Volvo was pretty crap as it looked a bit one of those low riding fridge Scania 141’s that the Irish lads used to drive.
The Volvo was gutless to say the least and I wondered if we had made the right decision to by it, it was going even worse than the Gardner powered Sed Atki we replaced it with. The first hiccup was the rise up into Dalkieth but I was lucky as the traffic lights at the top in the town center were green. The next bit was up out of Dalkieth past the transport yard, by this time the temp gauge was getting up past half, and it was raining, and I still had to get over Soutra
I won’t go into all the details, but when I got back to the yard Dad was there, and not very pleased, the concrete sleepers I had on board were 4 to the ton. However he didn’t complain that I managed to deliver 160 sleepers instead of 80 and billed the farmer accordingly.
Different end of the scale, I got weighted near the roundabout at Sleaford with a load of seed potatoes, and found to be 140 k’s over and was a bit ■■■■■■ that they were going to prosecute. I elected to go to our local court, and when the judge saw what I was in for he looked at the traffic commissioner and told him exactly what he thought of him.
" That’s not even the weight of decent fat bloke, or one child sitting on each axle, if you’ve nothing better than this we’ll all go home right now"
Jeff…