And electric buses and trams as well as other vehicles, I’ve said it times, we went backwards and only now are we starting to wake up to 60 year old technology.
I think we had to burn a lot of coal to power those trolleybuses and trams, as well as charging up the milk vans
Don’t forget the coal for the gas works (you younger fellas won’t remember the gas works in the time before the natural gas that we have now). When I started as a young fella at Fred Chappells if we had a couple of hours ish at the end of the day Fred would say “just do one to Harrogate Gas”. Weighbridge man would have gone home by the time I got there, just tip it in the stock yard and put the delivery note in the letter box. We had an open coal fire at home…I never actually bought any coal.
Coal was king back in the day.
Yes! I remember the big old gas-ometers that used to go down when the gas ran low. Every town used to have at least one. And I ran coal fires long after most people had central heating. We still had steam trains and trolleybuses when I was a nipper!
And electric buses and trams as well as other vehicles, I’ve said it times, we went backwards and only now are we starting to wake up to 60 year old technology.
I think we had to burn a lot of coal to power those trolleybuses and trams, as well as charging up the milk vans
Don’t forget the coal for the gas works (you younger fellas won’t remember the gas works in the time before the natural gas that we have now). When I started as a young fella at Fred Chappells if we had a couple of hours ish at the end of the day Fred would say “just do one to Harrogate Gas”. Weighbridge man would have gone home by the time I got there, just tip it in the stock yard and put the delivery note in the letter box. We had an open coal fire at home…I never actually bought any coal.
Coal was king back in the day.
Yes! I remember the big old gas-ometers that used to go down when the gas ran low. Every town used to have at least one. And I ran coal fires long after most people had central heating. We still had steam trains and trolleybuses when I was a nipper!
The by product of burning coal for town gas was briefly used as a domestic smokeless solid fuel for open fires (at least it was up in the NE) It trade name was Gloco. Awful stuff to handle and bag, light as a feather and the dust was eating pins and needles.
We had to get oversize sacks to to get a cwt in and because of the size limitations of the lifting cradle could only deliver half cwt bags from the autobagger.
Tyneside
Geordielad:
Now can any of you ‘Super Geeks’ explain to me why, when I post something from my computer on to this site that sometime that Slider Bar appears and sometimes it doesn’t. from Mushroomman
It will be due to the size of your pics, I think it explains somewhere on the site. The ones appearing with the slider may be slightly larger than the others hence the slider, sometimes members put on really large photo’s and the picture is almost lost on one side. Franky.
I find that when I magnify a picture using ctrl and +(right hand side of keyboard) the bottom scroll bar appears, click – and it disappears, using more than one click either way sometimes.
Oily
I was pleased to see the picture of the white Spanish Volvo among Oilys pictures above.
If my memory serves me well, Goyanes, the owner of this Volvo is from a small family
firm from Sarria in Northwest Spain, in Girona Province. I was on Brittany Ferries ship
Val De Loire, sailing from Plymouth to Santander, and the lorry next to my 17 ton truck
was a fridge artic bearing the name " Goyanes " , The driver and I had a brief chat, his
command of the English language was worse than my limited Espanol. From Santander,
he headed westbound in the direction of Santiago de Compostela, and I went due south
over the Picos de Europa mountains and on to Burgos, Madrid, and beyond.
And electric buses and trams as well as other vehicles, I’ve said it times, we went backwards and only now are we starting to wake up to 60 year old technology.
And the electric buses could go off route for some way if there was an obstruction such as Bernard Cribbens coming along and digging a bloody hole. The trams would be stuck for the day.
I still wonder about that, Trams on fixed rails,? have people wondered why we got rid of them in the first place.?
Dig:
It was a practice in those days to have some weight on the drive and Theiss put a concrete pad weighing a couple of tons on the floor of the crate we used to put a front end loader bucket of dirt in our crates which being just normal type trailers with a crate on but for general freight with the crate and off with the dirt with a shovel.Usually off siders were hard to find when those type of jobs turned up and we usually threw it off on the off and near sides.
At Buntines we stopped at the first giant anthills and set about them with axes and shovels to get a grip in the rivers.
4x4 Military Chevrolet recovery truck.
I know these sort of shows are not every ones cup of tea, but without the efforts of many enthusiasts we would be
denied the sight of these old warriors.
A great deal of interesting machinery would be missing from our lives.!
Kempston:
And electric buses and trams as well as other vehicles, I’ve said it times, we went backwards and only now are we starting to wake up to 60 year old technology.
I think we had to burn a lot of coal to power those trolleybuses and trams, as well as charging up the milk vans
Geordielad:
Now can any of you ‘Super Geeks’ explain to me why, when I post something from my computer on to this site that sometime that Slider Bar appears and sometimes it doesn’t. from Mushroomman
It will be due to the size of your pics, I think it explains somewhere on the site. The ones appearing with the slider may be slightly larger than the others hence the slider, sometimes members put on really large photo’s and the picture is almost lost on one side. Franky.
I find that when I magnify a picture using ctrl and +(right hand side of keyboard) the bottom scroll bar appears, click – and it disappears, using more than one click either way sometimes.
Oily
Thanks to Franky and Oily for helping me out with the slider bar problem.
It seems that all have I to do is to click once on the picture and it enlarges it. I never had this problem with my old computer so it’s great to find a solution.
The fourth picture shows a Ford Zodiac of the same year and colour of the one I had! I think it must be what was known as the Zodiac Executive and came with leather upholstery etc…
I loved it but lost it when the driver of a D Series artic fell asleep at the wheel late one evening and rammed me up the rear whilst I was stationary at lights pushing me in to the side of a TM artic! Happily all witnessed by 2 coppers sat in their car at that particular junction! They testified that they had spotted the driver slumped across the wheel and realised they were witnessing an accident about to happen… Amazingly the only injuries were to the two lorry drivers! I walked away. Built well, those Fords, I reckon.
That’s Goods Way, just behind Kings Cross & St Pancras Stations, behind those Buildings on the right is the Regents Canal, I spent many an hour down there fishing and larking about when I was a kid, that’s taken me right back, thanks for posting it Mushroomman
I do like that first picture, never had a drawbar tipper myself but have seen that operation in action, a long A-frame is needed of course.
At Toray, a very H&S type of company, I did an SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for turning a wagon and drag in a very restricted area. It involved driving to a halt to one side, locking only the rear trailer brakes then reversing towards the side of it, taking care (as this was not a long A-frame) not to foul the lights on the back of the wagon.
Then, after disconnecting the trailer and pulling forward a little, reverse past the trailer to somewhere where the wagon could do a 3 point (or however many) turn, then reverse back down to the A-frame and recouple.
Drive straight forward after releasing the trailer brakes.
This can be accomplished in a space no less than the length of the trailer. Very useful in our old, and very restricted site.
I also used this technique at a delivery point in Ireland. For some reason I wasn’t able to push the A-frame far enough, can’t remember why (probably too restricted to avoid damage), so after disconnecting I got the customer’s forkie to push the A-frame to the max jack-knife position then re-coupled and away.
I always loved wagon and drags, way more useful than artics for all but long loads, and converted the whole fleet at Toray during my time there.
Yes! I remember the big old gas-ometers that used to go down when the gas ran low. Every town used to have at least one. And I ran coal fires long after most people had central heating. We still had steam trains and trolleybuses when I was a nipper!
from Mushroomman
