Haven’t read the whole thread so apologies for duplication of nasty hills.
My first trip in my Leyland Comet, still aged 20, shouldnt have been driving, with 10 tons of timber for Wigan ( one ton overloaded already!) took me down the A74. Beattock at that time was a slow long climb on the northbound side and a very steep dip down the southbound side. The Leyland would manage about 50 normally. Down that steep slope I was doing over 60 and bricking it! Basically I’d lost control and was just hanging on.
I got away with it! My uncle Jack, whose timber I was hauling, when I told him about it, explained about going down hills in the same gear you would go up them, and told me a tale of when he used to haul timber for George C Croasdale at Haverthwaite. He had a meal in a cafe, which was actually an old bus, at the top of shap and sat with a young lad from Liverpool, who (like me) had been on his first trip.
The lad left first and Jack came across his wrecked truck at the bottom where you bend left, then right and there used to be the ‘Leyland Motors for all Time’ clock.
After that I used to go down Beattock and shap in low gear!
I saw the wrecked trucks in ‘death valley’ on Bolu about 8 years later, but swore it would never happen to me - yet was incredibly lucky to survive brake fade on the long run down into Damascus in 1976. I’d picked up a trailer in Iskenderun and hadn’t checked the brakes - went over Kizil Dagii and Belen no bother, but, like Black John, ran out of Ferodo towards Damascus. Very lucky not to kill myself. The F88’s brakes weren’t brilliant anyway, and the exhaust brake made a noise but didn’t slow you down - but when I finally brought it to a halt the tractor brakes were nearly on fire. when I climbed underneath, the trailer brakes hadn’t been adjusted since new. Mea Culpa, should have checked.
Before a trip to Khamis Mushayt from Dammam when doing internals in Saudi, I had a dream that the truck ran away from me on a hill, I knew the very spot, although I couldn’t point to it on a map 30 odd years later I can still see it in my mind’s eye. I woke up in a sweat the moment before the crash.
I went down that hill in bottom gear! Warning? Just a dream? Don’t know.
Did have an odd experience about 10 years ago though. I ran the Barrow Amtrak depot for 20 years after returning from Saudi.
One morning, Steve, a lad of about 22, who drove a van for a subbie, was loading his parcels and grabbed my hand ‘Hey John, I’ll have to drive carefully today, I got a phone call from a mate of mine at 6 o’clock this morning - he said he’d had a dream that I crashed the van and killed myself. The odd thing was, he’d had a similar dream about his Grandad dying and he died that day.’
At one o’clock, Steve crashed his van and he died in the wreck.
I don’t really believe in that stuff, but it sends a shiver down my spine whenever I think of it.
Was I just dreaming, or was I lucky that I took my premonition seriously and stayed in bottom gear? No idea.
Taif was another place you drove carefully. A vertical mile down switchback Tarmac.
The worst I ever encountered was a trip to Jizan, on the coast of the Red Sea, near the Yemen border. Along the switchback Asir mountain range, past Abha, I came to a closed gate with a guard. With my pidgin Arabic and his Pidgin English, I understood that they were building a new road and the gate wouldn’t open until after 4.00pm. I passed the time loosening the wheel nuts and freeing a trapped boulder from between the drive wheels on the tractor.
I was first in line when they opened the gate and there was an F1 scrum of drivers behind me. After 100 yards on a dirt road, the world ended. Directly in front, with no guard, was a drop of 10,000 feet, two miles, straight down. The road turned sharp right and hugged the mountain side until it went through a tunnel miles in the distance. I completely lost my bottle and would have turned round - but I couldn’t! Cars were already overtaking me. There was only one way - down!
You could see wrecked cars and trucks on the mountain side below. The road wasn’t paved, so every vehicle threw up clouds of dust.
Eventually you sort of got used to it. Sometimes the road was so narrow, you could see the trailer wheels hanging over - well - nothing! Other places it was wide enough for cars to pass, and they did - I have a vision of a small boy hanging out of a car window, a parabola of spew following him!
By the time I arrived at the tunnel, I was no longer in fear seizure mode and the rest of the trip down the mountain wasn’t as frightening - mainly because the new road was finished and much wider.
Tipped in Jizan and headed back.
Somehow the journey back up wasn’t as horrific. A sort of slower introduction to the jaw dropping heights involved near the top.
Definitely a once in a lifetime experience.
John
) was a life saver for me and possibly the inhabitants of the village below. If the brakes hadn’t locked on each time the air tanks emptied the result would have been very different.
After a while I walked into the village and found the police house. A copper in leathers answered the door, listened to my tale and, without a word, reached for his helmet and walked straight past me, slamming the door behind him and leaving me, still pale and shaking, on the doorstep.
