Heres another pic for you roping & sheeting aficionados. Ive put this one up before on another thread but worth another look i reckon. You cant beat an Atki with a roped & sheeted load for a bit of 1970s nostalgia.
Mark R:
Heres another pic for you roping & sheeting aficionados. Ive put this one up before on another thread but worth another look i reckon. You cant beat an Atki with a roped & sheeted load for a bit of 1970s nostalgia.
I did some agency work for Hammonds back in the 90s, driving a Sed/Atk Stratos.
The transport manager was a piece of work who treated agency drivers with contempt and wouldn’t even look at you when he was talking to you.
Then a week later he tried to blame me for smashing up the back of the cab on another motor (trailer over-run)but didn’t have the intelligence to consider that my diary and tacho discs clearly showed I had been driving a different unit.
Of course, no apology… 
Mark R:
Yes Tim, im affraid all those companies you named have finished now. ( as are Richard Lawson i think ).
Hi Mark, is that the Tompkinsons from Marden and Woodcocks from Headcorn that hav both finished?!
And have you seen anything of Rebecca A lately by the way? 
Yes, i’m affraid both Tompkinsons and Woodcocks have finished now, although i believe Tompkinsons still have their storage business. Where Woodcocks yard was is now a housing estate called the Woodcocks. As for Hammonds, they closed their transport side down years ago. I worked for them as a subbie,but i cant remember the transport manager to which you refur. Heres another old Hammonds pic, Brian Mills was the driver of this one.
Mark R:
Nice pic of one of Len’s old ERFs.
I worked for LV Transport in the late 80s, it seemed a dream come true after working with Lenny (evenings and weekends when I was at school) when he was with both Wallis Haulage and then Bewick in the 70s, as he lived two doors away from me.
By the time I worked for LV Transport his then wife Veronica was very much in charge of the operations, and while Len was never anything other than fair and pleasant towards me he wasn’t around that much, and the management regime in place was not to my liking in the least.
The company had a reputation for buying old wagons and running them into the ground, and what I was given to drive was no exception.
It was an ex Showrax V reg Ford D1000 (Perkins)four wheeler which had had the pantechnicon body cut down to a flat bed. It had the requisite bright red paint job, sun visor, coach wheel trims and looked very tidy - from the outside.
Inside was another story, the seats were split and worn out, no centre cover on the steering wheel, (MW) radio knobs missing, speaker split, and the gearstick gaiter was split, which let the oily smoke from the blown rocker cover gasket into the cab. And there were no door seals to speak of.
Fair enough, I was a new (class 1) driver, and needed to prove my worth, but I cannot write the words here that describe my feelings for the way I was treated.
I only stayed a few months, then left to join an agency, driving newer motors, earning almost twice as much, and even as an agency driver I was treated with more respect than the management at LV afforded me.
Disappointing.
While looking through all these old issues of Truck magazine, you soon realise what a patriotic bunch they were. Just take a look at some of these headlines!. Maybe the Marathon was better than the new F10, who knows, but i know what i would rather have had in 1978.
