All double Dutch to me then, how could things possibly change so much in only 57 years? 
Do the tunnels go under the harbour then, relieving the Harbour Bridge?
Yes that one to the west and then up round the back of Blacktown was the one I was looking at.
Don’t remember there being any tunnels when I was there.
@spardo You’re remembering correctly, there weren’t any then, but we haven’t been sitting around doing nothing, since you left. 
Getting to be a bit like Coober Pedy then. White Man in a Hole.
Perhaps just living up to the term Diggers. 
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I think you’ll find it’s Beresfield ;). And yes, that left hook getting onto Hexham bridge was always tricky and many effed it up.
Great story, do more.
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@parkroyal2100 yer right mate, if I’d made that mistake in the book it would’ve cost me about $1,096. 
Speaking of Hexham bridge and Karuah and the “expressway” from Hornsby, if I remember right the F3(?) ended well short of Newcastle (NSW), so you had to plot your route from ~ Cooranbong. At any rate, in the late 80s, going north was a bit of a trial, as I found out. It’s 1988 and I’m working as a casual (it’s my middle name) for a removals mob based in Mascot (a suburb near Botany, Sydney). One day I got the co-driver gig for a removal to the Gold Coast (IOW I’m doing an interstate removal 
), with which I am chuffed. The other bloke is Ronnie - he’s a Scotsman and a fitness fanatic and he looks a bit like the blonde one from Status Quo (we got on very well BTW, though what the Australian customers thought of a Scotsman and a Pom delivering all their worldly goods from one state to another is anyone’s guess). The reason I’m relating this is that when I took over the helm after a break at Karuah, it was dark and while the Hino FF had a seven speed box (five forward, reverse and neutral) and four headlamps, the road … sorry, the Pacific Highway, well it wasn’t any highway whatsoever - one lane each way, badly surfaced, poorly (if at all) marked, weird cambers and bridges over big rivers that were very very tight, so tight you’d all but scrape your left mirror along the ironmongery. Buladelah at night. I’d done many an excursion in the wee small hours facing the Irish wagons coming off the ferry at Stranraer while heading to Dumfries, but this was a bit sweaty. I was all in by the time we got to Ballina.
Nowadays, the trek from Sydney to Brisvegas is all dual carriageway/ motorway/ tollway with properly-graded roads and rest areas and speed cameras and average speed cameras and all the fast food outlets you can eat, but it wasn’t that long ago when most of it was a goat track.
There were tee-shirts for sale at every truck stop between Motto Farm and Coolangatta, that read Fix the Goat Track. How many bridges did we have to call? “Southbound little harbour.” We had names fo every bridge. Kempsy cops would try to book blokes for calling the bridge. Two trucks would fit if they pulled the RH mirrors in. Neither approach was visible from the other side.
Were you here when the Kempsy and Cowper bus crashes happened?
Yes to both, thankfully I wasn’t anywhere near either. Gruesome stuff but at least lessons were learned. Were you involved?
[edit:
On that subject, who is/ was Raymond Terrace?
Not directly, but I was running up and down the Pacific at the time. Fish out of Iluka, meat from Macksville and Grafton.
The manager of Motto Farm.
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A bit before my time because I was told the tale by fellow Buntine drivers of 2 road trains coming together head on on one of those rare but long narrow bridges in the Top End where the 2 entrances could not be seen from each other.
For some reason caution was thrown to the wind and one of them was thrown off the bridge into the river. But it was only a story to me, never met anyone involved to tell if it was apocryphal or not though.
Where’s dig when we need him?
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Professor CF has gone very quiet, he must be lecturing physics and mechanical engineering at either Cambridge or Oxford University for a thesis presentation on roping and sheeting.
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Don’t be silly, he is currently answering a call from Trump regarding anything ■■■■■■■■. his fame has spread back across the Atlantic.
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On speed dial to Air Force One.
More like trailing the Internet looking for a pipe for his brakes, which is impossible to get ANYWHERE