An Englishman's home is his castle — and a lorry
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delivered every brick, tile and piece of plasterboard. Housebuilding is said to be a barometer of the country's economy and if that is true we can go into the New Year with some optimism. There were 170,000 new homes started in 1983, which is the highest number for 10 years. In comparison, 1980 was the worst, with a lowly 88,000.
One of the hauliers serving
the construction industry is owner-driver Neil Gardiner from Crawley. Neil won a £32,000 Magirus Deutz 2320 26FK six-wheel tipper in a BEN/Iveco competition in 1981. CM has followed his progress since then and he has proved to be an astute businessman. His "Maggie" has now covered 160,000km (100,000 miles) since he started operations in August 1981 and is proving a trusty machine.
r furniture and sessions help turn your se into a home and it is a I bet to say that rything you see around is there by courtesy of a V.
le table may have been vered to your door by — that is obvious — but timber had to get out of forest in the first place; liture grows on trees. L the other end of the e you can have a iplete room's furnishings vered in one fell swoop. itat Contracts specialises utting together a cage like the one shown and 60 per cent of its s are exported. Their Comers are as diverse as day resorts in Hong Kong the contractors reding in the Falklands. Habitat has 43 branches in the United Kingdom and to service them it uses 15 drawbar outfits, one artic and 14 rigids in the 7.5 tonne gvw range. Although to all intents and purposes these are Habitat vehicles, they are operated on contract hire by BRS. The nearest BRS depot operates and maintains each branch's delivery vehicle while Western BRS looks after the trunking vehicles that supply the branches. We British are a restless lot; every year there are around two million household removals in the UK. But this does not mean that the professional removal men will be taking their holidays in Barbados next year. The growth of the self-drive van hire business has meant that more and more of us are struggling down the stairs with the wardrobe and moving ourselves. It is estimated that the professional removal companies have retained only just over a quarter of the household removal market.
The well-known East Anglian removal company AbeIs is definitely moving with the times with this Daf 2100 16-tonner. It is a high specification pantechnicon with a demountable body in a double-skinned glass fibre reinforced plastic and uses low-height demount equipment by Ray Smith. Bodybuilder Windfoil has given it the full aerodynamic treatment and has also reworked the standard Daf cab-top sleeper to give room for two berths, a cooker and a washbasin. If you heaved a sigh of relief when you completed your Christmas shopping, imagine how the supermarket checkout assistants felt when they locked up their tills on Christmas Eve.
According to the saying, we are a nation of shopkeepers, but statistics show that this is becoming increasingly untrue. In 1971 there were 105,000 grocery shops in the UK; by last year this number had fallen to 58,000, largely thanks to the growth of the supermarket chains.
The large retail chains operate some of the most professional road transport fleets in the country and the pictures here illustrate the efforts that Tesco is making in this direction. Contrasting with its existing, conventional artic is Tesco's experimental economy vehicle with a specification that Tesco and Leyland put together. It is a Roadtrain 1625 with aerodynamic aids (roof-mounted deflector, under-bumper aid dam and fairings between the axles) by Windfoil and a road-speed governor to ensure that th reduction in drag is not wasted in extra speed. An skid and anti-jack-knife equipment makes it a safe vehicle too.
Tesco put this economy vehicle on the road earlier this year and is due to rev the results in six weeks' time. It is said to have ma' some worthwhile fuel savings and a similar specification could be adopted for the future trunkers. Its white and rec livery has already been chosen as the new colour for Tesco's 400 other vehicles.
The road freight industry is helping you get the Christmas spirit — and wines and beers and soft drinks. The two or three months leading up to Christmas have been a particularly busy time for those involved in the distribution of drinks, whether for pubs and clubs or off-licences and supermarkets.
In 1983 we will have drunk our way through 750 million bottles of wine and 250-300 million bottles of spirits. To give an indication of how determinedly we celebrate Christmas, 35-40 per cent these sales are in the last quarter of the year.
The seasonal pattern of beer consumption is different — we drink more summer than at Christma This year, in the middle of summer we were drinkini million pints of beer a day whereas the yearly averal is 28.5 million pints a day.
Wine consumption in ti UK has been rising steadil for the last 15 years but where beers and spirits at concerned 1979 was the y when we really hit the bol Our beer consumption through the year averaged 33 million pints a day. Cheers! Christmas — the season of goodwill towards all men and the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show. There are around 20 million television sets in the UK and lorries played their part here too. The anti-juggernaut brigade might want to ban lorries wherever possible but would they really want to nip over to Japan to pick up their 26 inch colour set with remote control?
Even if they did, it would be a blank screen they would watch because the television companies use their own commercial vehicle fleets to bring the outside broadcasts back to your living room.
This is Thames Television's main outside broadcast unit, used to cover major occasions such as the Derby, state occasions and Miss World. It is on a Seddon Pennine bus chassis with bodywork by Locomotors of Andover. With six cameras working out of it it is a highly expensive vehicle and Thames expects to keep it at least 10 years.
If you are one of the seven per cent of television owners who do not have a licence you can expect a call from one of the Post Office's new detector vans. Some new Leyland Sherpas have just gone into service this month, bringing the detector van fleet up to 22. They are catching offenders at the rate of 87,000 a year and each one faces a maximum fine of £200.
mals do not celebrate istmas so the cow still duces her milk and the still wants to drink his icerful on Christmas f. Bridging the gap ween this animal supply I demand is the Milk rketing Board (50 years this year) and its :wort division which was amed Dairy Crest nsport in 1981.
:s 1,250 farm collection iicles form the largest A of 16-ton gvw tankers in country and they will be : as usual on Christmas rning to collect the milk m the farms; it is a 365 rs a year job.
he tanker shown here is que in the Dairy Crest A because it is the only imple of the new Perkins engined ERF M16 rigid launched in September. Dairy Crest Transport was one of the first operators to take delivery of this new 16tonner and it has been working out of the Nantwich depot, so it has not strayed too far from its Sandbach birthplace. Hardly anyone likes Ion' They are regarded as th, least desirable form of transport and get blame most of the ills on the IT During 1983 we reached total of 20 million motoi vehicles in Great Britain although there are 16 m cars it is always the 1.7 million goods vehicles ti get the blame for the tell jams, the noise and the fumes.
Perhaps the lorries th4 deliver the cars are exen Lorries do not just bring — every other mode of transport for both passe and freight is dependen. them, as these pictures demonstrate. The rallwr carriage was on its way Metro-Cammell in Birmingham to Hong KG while even the exotic, supersonic Concorde rel on the humble, definitel subsonic Bedford TK for step-up.
Every boy's dream for a Christmas present is a bicycle — unless he wants a computer! When he is out on his new machine he may feel a little threatened if a lorry fails to give him a sufficiently wide berth but he should remember how his bike was moved from factory to shop, and it was not pedal-power% This Volvo F6 16 ton gvw rigid, seen here in Halfor livery, is in fact operated contract by National Car As a premium specificat 16 tonner it can double f daytime store deliveries night-trunking between the Halfords warehouse Redditch and the Enfield regional warehouse.
Peddling bicycles has a growth business in the decade, partly due to the recent popularity of thei bike. in 1973 there were 830,000 new bicycles sol the UK; this had risen to million by 1975 and 1.9 million this year. Cyclist cover five billion kilomei (3.1 million miles) a year which is almost twice as as the distance covered I passengers on internal a routes. Maybe a "hummin' Cummins" is not music to your ears. You would rather listen to the strains of Bach played by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at its Christmas concert. But — yes, you've guessed it — how did the orchestra's instruments arrive at the concert hall? Musical director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Andre Previn took delivery of a new 13-tonne gvw Ford Cargo 1317 this October and it makes an interesting comparison with the orchestra's previous vehicle, a 7.5-tonne-gvw Ford 00710.
The older lorry had been bought in October 1978 and needed the wheelbase extended to accommodate all the instruments. By moving up the weight scale to a longer 13-tonner this has ;lot been necessary with the new Cargo. It is the maximum 11 m long and has an insulated body to protect delicate musical instruments from extremes of temperature.
The orchestra spends a good deal of time on tour at home and abroad and the £43,000 Cargo has a high specification to equip it for this type of work. It has the Cummins V8 engine option developing 131kW (175bhp), a Bostrom suspension seat and living accommodation for three crew. Because of the fixed aerodynamic fairing on the cab-top sleeper the cab does not tilt, and so engine access is via the floor.
The British Christmas Tree Growers' Association reckons to have sold around four million trees in the UK this Christmas but this was not one of them.
It is the tree in London's Trafalgar Square and there has been one there for the last 37 years thanks to the city of Oslo. It is a gift from the people of Oslo in recognition of the help given by Britain to Norway in the second world war.
This year's tree is almost 21.3m (70ft) high, weighs in at two tons and is over 50 years old. It is decorated with 650 white lights which is the Scandinavian preference to British-style coloured lights.
The lights were lit on December 8 but the tree had actually been in place since November 21. It had come by sea to Felixstowe where heavy and abnormal load specialist haulier Vanguard Engineering took over. It moved it overnight down to London using this Volvo F12 unit and Broshuis extending 12.2m (40ft) tandem axle semi-trailer which was at its maximum 18.3m (60ft) extension. A 120-ton capacity lorry-mounted crane from Silwood Crane Hire lifted the tree into the upright position in Trafalgar Square, where it will stay until January 6.