Hello from Western Australia

[Russell]

I did my time at Thornycroft at Basingstoke. It was a first class apprenticeship as they manufactured their own engines, gearboxes, front and rear axles, chassis and some cabs. i also did 6 months at their shipyard in Southampton.

I then made my career in commercial vehicles with the occasional excursion into the aircraft industry as most people did in those days as the money was good but there was no room for initiative.

I spent most of my life in the UK in the trailer industry spending time with Bristol (their BRS semi-trailer), Taskers (a bit of everything) and Doughty (mainly special trailers). I came to Western Australia when the UK vehicle industry virtually died in 1981 and and spent my time here designing fast mobile crane chassis, messing about with boats, doing a bit of training and finally running a large steel foundry.

Now retired and keeping in touch with other Thornycroft people.

[Andy]

Hi Russel, good to have you aboard, we hope you enjoy our new forum. Please contribute where-ever you can.
cheers,
Andy

[Ian]

Welcome to a very friendly forum Russel

Ian

[Western SMT]

Russell - welcome to this site and we look forward to hearing from you.

[mikefoster]

I'm another transferee from Ships Nostalgia, shipping having been my main interest in one way or another during my working life.

Equally, though, I've had a long-standing interest in vehicles, not in any way as a mechanic or in the vehicle industry, but starting way back in the 1950s when I was in the Economics Division of Shell in London. It was an outfit that assiduously maintained records on motor vehicles worldwide, all as part of the background operation in knowing as much as possible about what made the oil world tick.

Much more recently I've found myself involved in oil history. Shell in New Zealand had a history written of its operations here, published in 2004, and I immediately found that it had a horrendous number of mistakes of all sorts. In the course of three years, with heaps of research, I progressively wrote a new history, dodging the buckshot based on supposed infringement of copyright - it fact it was well off target because you simply can't copyright the facts of history, simply a particular presentation of them.

One area of the history that was weak (as was a previous history by Mobil) was the very early development of motor vehicles in the first decade of the 1900s. Another year's research has led to a 50-page supplement and has turned up a remarkable amount about early vehicles and early oil trade in this country. We got our first motor omnibus in 1904, a Stirling, followed by two more in 1905, and they operated in Christchurch. At that time the South Island was about equal in population to the North Island.

All my books have been self-published and in very small numbers, but it has been a fascinating retirement activity that I never ever bargained for !

I'll look forward to visiting and revisiting "truckand bus".

Mike Foster

PS Ironically, the centenary history of the Royal Dutch Shell Group in 2007, huge three volumes, proved equally faulty, so I've written a critique of that too, but that is probably a little off-topic for this forum as I can't recall any particular problems directly related to motor vehicles.

[G6 UXU]

Hello Russell and welcome. All the best.

[brushy2]

I served my apprenticeship with Northern Trawlers at Grimsby , Lincs. first on steam and later on what was ,then, new diesel trawlers.. went to Merchant Navy from 1950 to 56 , couldn't settle after trying work at Steelworks & Rolls Royce aero engines and left to South Africa in 62. Much more interesting work with personal freedom to work without Unions.main jobs were building Power Stations , main and standby . Went to Zambia , heading a maint team on Diesel Electric locos, Canada next with Canadian Pacific Rail, Fell out with US unions , back to SA and on to Malawi. Became maint engineer with ESCOM with 5 power stations , all black labour force, few europeans, sited and commisioned new P/S at Kasungu near presidents palace, expanded P/S at Capitol City Lilongwe with Ruston 16atc gen set,.
On leave in UK when asked to come to Aust. More P/S work in NW of WA on iron ore mines.
Invited to go to Christmas Island , 2 P/S there, installed and commisioned 20 Cyl 2 stroke power pack (largest in Southern Hemisphere at the time) and 7 years later came to WA to retire.

Son drives a rig of Mack Titan prime mover, (Cat 600 hp) , quad trailers , all side tippers , allup weight of 145 tonnes , building new port at Karatha WA.
Cheerio from me at Waikiki Western Australia.

[Ian]

A warm welcome to both Mike Foster and brushy2 looking forward to viewing photographs and reading posts from you both.

Ian