A nightmare for the last man in the queue! He will have had a long wait.
The photo was taken in the early 90s during reconstruction and resurfacing of the M11 in the “lane rental” days when contractors got paid extra for early completion. Note the contraflow working on one carriageway also a regular feature of that period. Scenes such as these were typical when big tonnages were ordered and things went wrong with the laying gang. Materials were supplied from the Midlands quarries backed up by East Anglian and London plants. Up to 5000 tonnes per day were laid with multiple gangs
It also shows how popular Fodens were on such schemes.
Had plenty of that over the years, sometimes one load would last you all day! To be fair the large tonnage jobs were often very well organized and there were usually spare machines on site to cover any breakdowns. However weather conditions were something you couldn’t do much about. I remember one saturday being one of several trucks involved in resurfacing the A500 ‘D’ road at Talke and there were several different gangs working on various parts of the road. ‘Our’ part was below the flyover where the A34 crossed and there was a belt of dense freezing fog that refused to lift until afternoon so the clerk of the works wouldn’t give permission to lay until the ground temperature was ok. Unbelieveably only a quarter mile up the road it was bright sunshine and trucks were passing us in droves to keep the gang on that section supplied with tarmac! Waiting time was signed with no problem but it made for a long saturday.
Awoken this old thread from it’s slumber! Watching tv t’other day it showed the ‘new’ Nottingham Ice Stadium and it jogged the memory of when I took a load of stone there from Crich quarry in the early 2000’s when it was being constructed. It was a strange site, a large bowl at that stage but a lot of work going on at higher (street) level. Anyway I pulled on site, as usual nobody showed the slightest interest in me but I could see some labourers waving at me from the far side so I reversed round to them. They sited me, opened the taildoor and I started tipping…and then all hell broke loose! Mr ‘High Viz Site Manager Man’ came waddling towards me red in the face: “What do you think you are doing driver, you can’t drive around there with a truck?” and I replied that I just had! “It isn’t safe, you can’t drive around here” he repeated. The two labourers were killing themselves, then he started on them! Apparently where I had just driven around was just a shelf, there was no supports under it and the stone had been stockpiled and taken round in a small dumper, the labourers waved me across because the dumper was too slow! They got a bollocking from the manager which they took plenty of no notice of, he then asked me how I was going to get out again! I said that if it had stood 26 tonnes across it then I should be fine empty and reluctantly he let me across again. I was rather nervous myself but made it ok, I never went there again and I wasn’t sorry about that!
Another time I went to a housing project just off of the Broadway, Walsall, with tarmac. There were a few of us there, firms usually ordered about 80 tonnes on site at any one time to get a good start to the day and I parked up with the other lads while the paver was setting up. The site roads were all stoned up ready for the tarmac base course but where the manholes etc were going to be located had been covered with wood which they would remove later so we knew not to drive on them. Anyway I was sitting in the cab when Malc Williams who drove for Frank Dale came chatting to me by the cab door. Suddenly there was a ‘crack’ and the truck lurched and I was face to face with Malc! One of the boards had been covered with stone by error, and I had parked the offside front wheel bang on it! The axle was touching the ground, luckily the tipper pump below the gearbox was just clear though, and of course all the brickwork on the manhole was wrecked. I managed to reverse back out and no damage was done to the truck, I wasn’t popular with the site manager though but luckily Malc vouched that the board wasn’t visible and I heard no more about it.
However, the following day I was on a site in Nottingham tipping tarmac and was told to park out of the way for a few minutes while the gang levelled some by hand so the banksman guided me to the edge of the site …and the same thing happened again! This time there was a gas valve below ground which again had been covered with stone, luckily it just missed the nearside front tyre. They say that things happen in threes but just those two events were more than enough for me!
Had an incident when the M62 was being built at the Worsley Interchange . Half a dozen of us with brand new AEC artics with hot mix , the site office was up a temporary road , so we pulled up there to get notes signed before tipping . One chap , ( long rip ) parked on the bank pulled the deadman on and joined the queue .A few minutes later we heard a crashing and banging , the air had run out and the lorry rolled off down the track , rolled down the bank onto the motorway . It had a handbrake lever but being lazy he used deadman and spring brakes weren’t common then , the lorry was on it’s first load .
Construction sites could be dangerous places Dave, had a few incidents myself on them at times. I actually think that I saved a chap from serious injury or even death at one job we were on. It was one afternoon at Sixfields, Northampton, and I had tipped and was cleaning the taildoor off when I noticed that the paver driver had dropped the flaps which before the days of banksmen was a signal for the next truck to reverse on. However one ganger then decided to clean the excess material from the front of the machine and hadn’t noticed the truck reversing, despite that it had a reversing horn and a flashing beacon on the rear crossmember. I suppose the machines engine noise drowned the horn? Anyway he was bent over and oblivious to the fact that the truck was almost on top of him and I shouted STOP as loud as possible to Tony the driver and luckily he heard me. The guy went to stand up and hit his back on the rear of the truck body, that’s how close he came to getting squashed. It shook him up a little but nothing was said.
Waiting time was signed with no problem but it made for a long saturday.
Mr ‘High Viz Site Manager Man’ came waddling towards me red in the face: “What do you think you are doing driver, you can’t drive around there with a truck?” and I replied that I just had! “It isn’t safe, you can’t drive around here” he repeated. The two labourers were killing themselves, then he started on them! Apparently where I had just driven around was just a shelf, there was no supports under it and the stone had been stockpiled and taken round in a small dumper, the labourers waved me across because the dumper was too slow! They got a bollocking from the manager which they took plenty of no notice of, he then asked me how I was going to get out again! I said that if it had stood 26 tonnes across it then I should be fine empty and reluctantly he let me across again. I was rather nervous myself but made it ok, I never went there again and I wasn’t sorry about that! 
